


Invisible Strings

by a_stankova



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 03, Angst, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Eve Polastri, F/F, Fashion & Couture, Fluff, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Murder Wives, On the Run, Partners in Crime, Power Dynamics, Slow Burn, Smut, Soft Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, The Appreciation Villanelle is Owed, The Journey Eve Deserved, The Twelve - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:55:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 63,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28346484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_stankova/pseuds/a_stankova
Summary: "There's a part of me that aches, all the time. I lost everything. And yeah, she...she's gone, too. I don't know who or what it is that I'm missing."Somewhere inside her mind, the answer rears, creaking in the void. Eve blinks, loosens the thought with a shake of her head. She's not nearly drunk enough.Season three fix-it, complete with plot line, equal character development for both leading ladies, and spades of Villaneve (eventually).
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 167
Kudos: 489





	1. Dormiveglia

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome, children, to the season three that my brain could not give up on. Settle in!

_dormiveglia: [noun] – the space between sleeping and waking_

On April 9th, it is 27°c in Central Italy – uncharacteristically humid, and somewhat of an inconvenience to those who had brought a thicker coat for the crisp evenings they had been forewarned about for this time of year. Eve Polastri, to her credit, had not worn her coat that day, but nonetheless the sun inspires damp heat in her blood beneath her turtleneck, just rousing enough for her to notice something new, something eclipsing, even in her half-conscious state.

It’s pain, like she has never experienced before. It stretches and tumbles; it’s the thrum of trauma in her limbs, the spots in her vision, the stink and stick of copper between her teeth. She burns, hot, merciless, until eventually she is cold, and she strains to open her mouth against the blood, to scream for help.

But it’s 27°c in Central Italy, and her throat scratches like sand.

Would anyone even hear her, anyway?

It grows hotter then, so unbearably stifling that it makes her ache, and suddenly her head is spinning and her back is _splitting_ and –

It turns white – captive, all-encompassing.

She does not speak until April 14th.

Two days previously, she had awoken in a haze, half-convinced that she had been returned to the incessant dreariness of the UK. She’d listened for rain in those first few moments, looked for familiarity in the signage around her – any hint of London that would assure her that she’d gotten out, that she was safe, that it was over.

The Italian language had stared back at her, mocking her from every corner of the room. This isn’t her bed, isn’t her bedroom; rather it’s a hospital in a foreign country, and she hasn’t escaped a damn thing.

Nurses have been attending to her religiously, lifting the bandages on her shoulder and informing her that she is a miracle, that they are impressed with her, that she is _lucky_. Eve feels anything but, but says nothing. If she could muster up the courage to laugh, she would, but even the thought incites fresh agony to blow through her. She stares at the ceiling, at the paint that peels off by the skylight, and remembers it all, in silence, and in horrifically clarifying detail.

Raymond, red and spurting and _fuck, what the fuck have I done;_ hands guiding her down marble steps and cobblestone alleys. _Her_ : the gleam of her smile when she’d proposed dinner, the anger in her eyes when Eve had turned to walk away, and then there were birds and a _bang_ and –

Then the ground, cold, rushing up to meet her face.

Through it all, Eve has been staring at the paint – chipped, fragile, imperfect next to the brightness of the lightbulb. The pain in her shoulder reminds her, persistently, that she’s still alive, still human, still capable of feeling. She’s not sure she’d know, otherwise.

Tears surprise her today, on April 14th. She is looking at the same spot on the ceiling, unaware she is even crying until a nurse is by her side, dabbing at her cheeks with a cloth, hushing her gently and promising her that the pain will ease soon, that she’ll be fine.

Eve is so utterly incensed by that that she does laugh this time, her voice hoarse from disuse. The nurse steps back, briefly startled, but he is a professional, evidently well used to patient behaviours if his air of calm is anything to go by. The sympathy underlying it all makes Eve angrier, but not more so than what he tells her next, in English both broken and confident:

“Your friend is on her way. She has good Italian. She bring you just in time!”

Eve’s stomach twists as dread settles. _Fuck her_ , her mind spits at her, sparking for the first time in days to stoke the ache in her blood, allowing it to shift from anger to a boiling fury. When the nurse leaves the room, Eve glares furiously at the ceiling, thinks about the birds and the sun and how much she’d like to go back in time to Paris and stab her harder, stab her _better._

_She came back. She shot me and then she came back._

_She shot me and then she saved me._

It shouldn’t feel like a kindness, and it doesn’t.

(It doesn’t.)

Eve steels herself for the bitter hurt that will no doubt seek to engulf her the moment their eyes meet, but it never comes.

“Hello Eve,” the woman sighs in greeting with a polite smile, slipping her hands into the pockets of her navy slim-fit trousers. “You’re awake. Good.”

Oh. Okay.

Eve does her best to ignore how deflated she suddenly feels, closes her eyes against the odd sense of disappointment that clings to her now, allows herself to remember the betrayal as well as the outrage.

Because Carolyn had fucked her over, too. Nobody was blameless. But still, this…this means…

_She shot me and then she never looked back._

_She shot me and she left me to die._

At this realisation, the ache inside her widens, grows cold and hollow in a way it categorically hadn’t been the last time she’d been with Villanelle.

Villanelle, who had shot her. Who had left her to die.

Who had left.

“ _Per favore,_ Bernardo, _facci dei caffè?_ ” Carolyn speaks to the nurse in perfect Italian, but still makes the gesture of bringing a pretend cup to her lips, perhaps only for Eve’s benefit. “ _Con latte e zucchero._ ”

“ _Sí, sí,_ ” Bernardo replies, already headed, conveniently, in the direction of the door Carolyn had just entered through. It’s not until he’s left the room that Eve realises that he’d been clock-watching for the last ten minutes, and suddenly this feels like something of a set-up.

But why wouldn’t it be? That did seem to be Carolyn’s business strategy of choice these days. Hell, maybe it always had been. Eve thinks back to Moscow, her interactions with Vladimir and Konstantin, her secret visit to Villanelle in the prison. Had Carolyn been fuelling her own agenda all this time? 

And if so, to what end?

Carolyn takes the seat by her bed, crosses one leg over the other and clasps her hands over her knee. Eve sees it for what it is – the beginning of a lengthy discussion. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been better,” Eve grumbles, almost shaking her head in disbelief that she would even ask that question.

“Mm,” Carolyn hums knowingly, pausing for a moment before she speaks again. “We have some things we need to discuss,” she says, so matter-of-factly it borders on ignorance.

It offends Eve. “Like _Hell_ we do,” she snaps. “Get out of my room.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Eve,” Carolyn scolds lightly. “It’s truly unbecoming of you.”

If Eve could muster up the strength to move, she’d get up and walk straight to London right goddamn now, thunk the woman in the face with her fist as a parting shot because honestly _fuck her_. How dare she walk in here like nothing has happened? How dare she act so professional and blasé when everything has gone to shit? She was _shot,_ for fuck’s sake. She rolls her eyes so hard they hurt, hopes it’s enough to convey how utterly pissed off she is.

“Seriously, Carolyn,” she huffs out, closing her eyes in exasperation, “I’m in no mood for your bullshit right now. So just get to the point so I can go back to sleep.”

Silence stretches between them then. It’s only brief, but it’s enough to make Eve wonder if Carolyn has left the room. When she opens her eyes again, it’s to the other woman staring at her, with such concentration that it’s as if she’s studying her. It unnerves Eve. “What?”

“What happened with Villanelle?”

“Nothing happened.”

“You mean she shot you for no reason?”

Eve decides, as her cheeks turn crimson, that she would have preferred the silence. “She…she wanted us to–run away together.” Then,quite unnecessarily: “I said no.”

“Why?”

“ _Why_? Because it would have been insane!”

“I see,” Carolyn says, but Eve very much doubts that she does. “Well I suppose if nothing else you were well hidden.”

“She could have _killed_ me!”

“Come now, Eve, that would have been very unlikely. I’m no devil’s advocate but that bullet wouldn’t have killed a dog.”

“You know what, I’d really rather not talk about this anymore,” Eve snaps. She’s vibrating with her rage, her embarrassment, torn between her desperation to be swallowed by the earth or her urge to beat the shit out of someone. It makes her head spin, makes her wound twinge. She’s so goddamn tired. “Why don’t you just say what you came here to say and then leave me alone?”

“Very well,” Carolyn says, happy enough to be unencumbered by small talk, getting down to the nature of her visit. “We found a member of the Twelve in your hotel – he was practically decapitated. Somewhat of a mess, frankly. Would you know anything about that?”

_Raymond, red, spurting._

_He will come after us. He will kill us._

_Do it, Eve!_

_Hit him in the head!_

_Imagine he’s a log!_

“Villanelle’s handiwork, I presume.”

_You really did take chunks out of him._

_I wanted you to know how it feels._

_You made us safe._

Eve’s silence speaks volumes – Carolyn raises an eyebrow. “Or not?”

Eve swallows hard against the bile in her throat, prepares for the shock to dawn on Carolyn’s face when the penny drops and it all becomes clear.

_I think I’m gonna be sick._

_You want me to be a mess. You want me to be scared._

_I’m like you now. I’m not afraid of anything._

_This is what you wanted._

Carolyn hums again, her face practically unchanged. “I see. That is a surprise.”

Except…

Except it really doesn’t _sound_ like she’s all that surprised.

(Eve had expected a more impassioned reaction – she’s almost disheartened.)

“Well then, all the more reason for what I’m about to tell you,” Carolyn says, pressing on as if this new development is neither here nor there, as if it were just another piece of this fucked-up jigsaw. Eve’s head aches with the thoughts running through her mind – is murder just, _not_ a big deal anymore? Is is just something that they’re all just supposed to accept and be okay with and ignore? When did the lines between work and personal life blur?

Or, the scarier part of brain hisses, is it just that Carolyn had always expected this of Eve? Had Eve gotten so sucked into Villanelle’s world that murder – a step further away from her own world – had been the only logical next step?

Maybe Carolyn had killed, too. Maybe everyone she knew had.

Except, maybe, for Bernardo, who really is taking an awfully long time to make coffee but then again maybe ‘coffee’ is Carolyn-code for ‘don’t come back’.

Eve is so distracted by her raging mind that she misses what Carolyn says next, hears only the words “best interests” and “disappear.”

“Disappear?” She asks, somewhat dumbly. To save face, she groans on cue, traces her fingers over her bandages.

“Yes,” Carolyn says, affording only the briefest of glances to Eve’s wound. Perhaps the Polastri pokerface isn’t as good as it used to be.(Or maybe she just doesn’t feel pity.) “MI6 have already begun drafting the paperwork, but I thought it best to at least ask your permission first. Only polite.”

Eve blinks, utterly confused. “I’m sorry, by disappear, you mean…what, exactly?”

“Die, Eve.”

Eve balks at that. Carolyn never has been one to beat about the bush, but it’s never jarred her quite so fully. “I beg your pardon?”

“On public record only, of course. Really, I should have thought that was obvious.” At Eve’s horrified expression, Carolyn sighs. “Come now, Eve. You can hardly expect to go on as normal now, can you?”

It’s phrased as a question, but it isn’t one.

Eve can’t think of a single thing to say. Every word she’s ever learned empties from her head now, until she’s left with her jaw hanging pointlessly open, a million uncoordinated sounds itching to escape out into the room. How extensive does Carolyn-code get, since ‘disappear’ also means something other than its standard definition? Did any word ever just mean what it is meant to?

Carolyn resumes, seeking to do what she does best and take this opportunity to put everything into a clear-cut perspective. “The Twelve will be looking for you, Eve. You _and_ Villanelle. What do you imagine they will do if they catch you? You think they’ll be understanding? You think they’ll show you mercy? Trust me _–_ hard as that may be for you at the moment – this is your safest option now. Your only option, really. Plus,” and she almost laughs, waving a hand at her wound, “you’re already in hospital with a bullet in your back. I suppose, in a roundabout sort of way, she did you a favour.”

“Doesn’t _feel_ like much of a fucking favour,” Eve snaps, suddenly finding her voice again.

“Nevertheless, it gives us a story,” Carolyn shrugs, and really, this feels far too commonplace, far too organised, almost standard. How had it come to this? How had it come to be that this – killing Eve – was the only way forward?

And why did it feel like she was just the next in a long line of at-risk MI6 agents?

Still, it makes sense, loathe as Eve is to admit that of anything Carolyn might suggest at this moment. In her shoes, Eve would probably be telling her the same thing, damn all the friends and family she’d be leaving behind.

Shit, Niko! God, how is she going to explain this to Niko? He doesn’t even know where she is right now, and maybe he really doesn’t care anymore. It ought to twist Eve into nervous, guilty knots, ought to make her see the error of her ways or some shit, and go back to him like the dutiful wife he so clearly wants her to be. All Eve wants is her own bed and a pint of gin. When exactly had her desires become so out of sync with her husband’s? Had they always been destined to drift apart, even before Villanelle had wormed her way into their lives?

She supposes it’s as pointless to ponder that as it would be to ponder whether or not she had always been destined to murder a man. Surely all that matters now is what comes next, and whatever she has to do in order to be able to accept and be okay with and ignore.

Eve’s head is swimming – she could do with some time alone, to process everything that has happened, that is going to happen. But Carolyn has settled well into her chair and shows no signs of departing any time soon. Eve supposes that there must be more, is reluctant to ask (how could things be worse?).

She doesn’t have to.

“You ought to know, as well. Your husband was in jail.”

Eve blinks, feels the bed almost bottom out beneath her. “My…he what?”

“He was found in a storage unit, with a body. One of his colleagues.”

Eve sees her clearly – her red hair, her huge tits, her stupid annoying face. She attempts to ignore the tiny part of her that wants to laugh, focuses instead on the absolute horror of imagining Niko in a jail cell, tries to find words in the mess of her head in order to string a sentence together.

It’s as she’s doing this that she cottons on to one key aspect of Carolyn’s statement. “I…wait, _was_? As in, no longer in jail?”

“Mm,” Carolyn affirms; Eve’s shoulders sink in relief because that’s something, at least. “Apparently he told them a rather elaborate tale about a certain…oh, now what was the word he used?” She sucks in through her teeth, thinks for a second before “ah yes, that’s right, _domownik_.”

“A what?”

“Forgive my rough Polish translation but I’m fairly certain the word is ‘home-wrecker’.”

_Domownik_. Villanelle would love to know that Niko is calling her that. It seems like the type of word she would use herself, liberally, cavalierly, vaingloriously.

Eve pushes away the thought of her – you’d think by now it would be second nature – and shakes her head, as if that alone can clear it. “When did you find out about this?”

“Likely around the time that you were chopping up a little English man with your girlfriend.”

Eve’s stomach lurches suddenly and she’s certain she’s going to vomit, because all she sees when she thinks of Raymond is the colour red, clarifying as fire and so dark she can practically smell it.

But he had been a murderer, she tells herself. He had been part of the Twelve, a professional, and he’d never have let Eve live – what else could she have done? He’d had his hands around Villanelle’s throat, he’d been choking her, he’d wanted to _kill_ her, and–

But they’re all murderers now, aren’t they?

What else could she have done?

It’s harsh, the gravity of it all, and it makes Eve feel as if she’s come untethered from the earth. When Carolyn asks if she should tell Niko of her current situation, her immediate instinct is to refuse, because she’s a mess and in pain and much as she’d like to pretend it’s out of concern for him, she really just doesn’t want him around.

But what else can she do? Who else does she have?

So she bites back her response, nods her head instead. She’ll have a few days, she figures.

“Alright,” Carolyn sighs, finally going to stand. “I’ll put him in touch with you. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before we can get you back to London.”

Eve could cry – it is the best news she’s had in ages. But there’s one thing that still bugs her, more so than anything else, something she’s been contemplating since she woke up.

“How did you find me?”

Carolyn looks at her then, sighs and shoves her hands into her pockets. “She called me. Told me you’d been a dickhead.”

Eve blinks, then bursts out laughing, almost maniacally. “Of course she did.”

Carolyn frowns, looking almost sympathetic, and Eve sobers a little, wondering if she looks as crazy as she suddenly feels. “I’ll leave you to rest, Eve,” she says, turning for the door before seeming to think better of it. She turns back, furrows her eyebrows, eyes glinting as a question forms there.

“Where did she go?” she asks her, her face set in stone, like maybe she’s only curious.

Eve knows, instinctively – knows exactly where that asshole is. And maybe she would confess, were it not for the fact of Carolyn’s unreadable expression. ‘Alaska’ sticks in Eve’s throat, uncomfortable and misplaced, and everything in her is screaming for her to keep her mouth shut. What if Carolyn goes after her? What if Carolyn really _is_ a part of the Twelve, and she sends _them_ after her? What would be to stop her from sending them to Eve’s house one day?

(Why, after everything, does she even care about what happens to Villanelle?)

It’s all of these questions, raging in her head like wildfire, that have Eve shaking her head. “She’s gone,” she says, quite simply and almost strangled as her voice threatens to break in two. “It’s done, it’s over. She’s gone.”

She wonders who she’s trying to convince. She wonders why she’s still protecting her.

She wonders what she might be doing right now if she’d gone to Alaska; if she’d feel any cleaner.

Carolyn accepts this answer with her usual nod, but she seems displeased. Eve couldn’t care less. She sinks into her pillow, is about to close her eyes when she hears Carolyn speak again, a final parting shot, a thinly veiled ‘fuck you’.

“Hugo is alive, by the way.” Then she is gone, and _shit._

Eve sinks further down, her body aching with guilt and shame. She hasn’t thought of Hugo once, and it sickens her. How far she’s fallen from the days where it had just been the Trafalgar Team, cooped up in a tiny office, putting together the cluster-fuck of the jigsaw puzzle that is Oksana Astankova ( _who had shot her, who had left her_ ).

Kenny would still be her friend. Bill would still be alive.

She’d give anything to go back.


	2. Toska

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Villanelle, Alaska and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

_toska: [noun] – an aching anguish of the soul_

She so hates it when they die too soon, but really, this guy is taking the piss. Her hands crush tighter around his throat, pulsing with determination, but hearing him gasp and claw for air grows tiresome incredibly fast, and she think she’s never felt more impatient in her life. His neck, she decides, is too thick with fat, and she’s too drunk. It’s as good a two-fold excuse as any. With a snarl, she drops him to his knees in the alleyway, listens to him cough and splutter for all of three seconds before she’s walking off, folding herself away into the shadows.

Villanelle is finding, more and more, that giving up is easy, and while it may be a new concept for her, it’s not one that’s she’s entirely against. She supposes this town brings it out in her, because, as it turns out, Alaska is so very boring.

The food here is shit. The fish is fresh enough, snatched from the sea every morning, but it’s bland, all of it is bland; Villanelle misses Paris most at meal times, mourns the crackle of a warm baguette as she forces the food down, finding more often than not that she isn’t all that hungry. She does ponder the possibility that grief, coiled in her intestine like a worm, could be the thing disrupting her appetite, causing food to taste like cardboard.

She decides against it. Decides that Alaska just has a shitty take on fine dining.

To her utter horror, fashion also ceases to exist in this place – the women are bare-faced, walk around town as part of one collective palette of drab, dull colour. Villanelle takes to calling it the Polastri effect, and before long the whole island has swarmed into one monotonous, grey blob, determined to suck Villanelle into its perpetual jadedness.

Villanelle sure as shit won’t be seen dead in the blob. She endeavours to inject style into the town by becoming the proud owner of a white Audi Q3 Sportback SUV, and as soon as Villanelle has access to the Internet, she scours endlessly until she comes across a pair of Jimmy Choo wellington boots. They cost almost $400; black gloss, set with the gold ‘JC’ emblem, complete with rounded toe and a cosy inner lining. She orders them express and still has to wait three days for them, but it is worth it, when she can wear them knowing that she’s coercing people into self-reflection about their own choices. They make her feel rich, powerful; utterly like herself.

Because otherwise, she really, really isn’t, a fact of which she is acutely aware but has thus far been choosing to ignore, lest she be forced to face herself.

It used to be easier to do that, back before Eve. Even with Anna, she’d known who she was, how she’d felt; she knows why she killed her husband. He’d held Anna back, had been an obstacle in their great romance.

It’s different with Eve. With her, Villanelle feels unhinged, like she’s come undone and Eve is the only one who can put her back together. But how can Villanelle look into a mirror now and see anything other than the woman who’d fired the gun? Eve didn’t love her, she reasons. Eve had walked away, and suddenly Villanelle had been reacting, lashing out, and she’s been trying since Rome to navigate through her own mind, which seems like unfamiliar territory to her now.

Had she been angry? Vengeful? Had she been seeking to punish, or kill? Did she wish she could take it back? Did she want Eve to have died?

Is it possible that she feels all of these things, that they can be felt so strongly all at once?

You don’t understand what that is.

Fuck Eve for saying that. Maybe she didn’t know Villanelle at all. She hopes she’s dead.

But no, she thinks, there is no way that she is. She’s far too stubborn to be dead. Nothing would part them – if Eve were really gone, dead and buried and rotting beautifully under the earth, then she’d surely be waiting for Villanelle in the darkness that comes next; with furious hands and a snarl curling at her open, waiting mouth.

And if Eve were alive – and she must be, because Villanelle would have gone cold long before now otherwise – then she’d run true to form; what was really left for her in London anyway? She’d followed Villanelle to Berlin, to Moscow, to Paris, to Rome (‘Amsterdam’ is an ugly word so it’s ignored), gotten closer every time, close enough to touch, to tempt, to kill. Why wouldn’t she follow Villanelle into death, if only to make sure she was really dead this time?

(Or maybe she’d kiss her at long last, steal her final breath away as recklessly and deliciously as she’d plunged a knife into her belly.)

Villanelle is not worried. Eve will come running, like she always does, and everything will work itself out. It won’t be long.

There are two bars within walking distance; the Wise Bear and the White Tulip, the latter of which Villanelle finds herself in the next night. She has chosen tight blue leather jeans and a low-cut black sweater, which sparkles and accents her chest; she’s swapped out her Jimmy Choos for peep-toes and has released her hair from its earlier braid, tousled it through with her fingers. She looks ready to be ravished; when she slides onto an empty stool at the bar, several people turn to look at her, let their eyes linger for a few seconds longer than would strictly be necessary. It’s exciting, to tantalise those around her, to be watched by them. To think, that most of them will never see her for who she really is, will only ever see what she chooses to show. It’s the kind of power that must drive politicians and world leaders to corruption.

Gin and tonic is her drink of choice now – she hasn’t had champagne since her last dinner with Aaron Peel in Rome. She’d never much enjoyed alcohol before – found it debilitating to her control – but she dismisses the thought from her mind rather quickly, seeks out her human instinct to forget. She drinks doubles at a time, usually four or five, or as many as it takes to forget that she has assimilated Eve Polastri’s poison. Most nights, she will only have to buy one drink; the next are bought by a perfect stranger, a man who leers with his teeth, a woman who smiles with her eyes. She will thank and dismiss the men and invite the women home with her – some are brunette, some are blonde, but all are called Eve, and all grab her hair when she has them in her mouth. She’d always imagined that the real Eve would do that.

It bugs her that she cannot shake the idea of Eve in her bed, no matter how much she drinks. She wonders how long that can possibly last for, how much longer it will be just a feverish fantasy. Still, nothing to spend tonight worrying about; she smiles sweetly at the barman, orders a gin and tonic in a rich American accent and moves her hair to further expose her shoulder for the benefit of the elderly man now ignoring his wife in order to stare at her.

Poor bastard.

She observes carefully the room before her, takes note of the details; the nose ring the bartender wears, the number of people around, the closest exit. She spots her almost immediately, across the bar; her white blouse, her naked arms, her chestnut locks. The woman is alone, one hand fisted under her temple as she sips at an apple martini. She is pretty, Villanelle decides, and entirely out of sync with the rest of the place; she teeters just on the outside, looking in, rolling her eyes every so often at the group of men in the booth behind her who feel the need to bellow and knock pints every time a joke is made.

Eve would probably do the same. It is 9:15pm here in Anchorage; 6:15am tomorrow in London, 7:15am in Rome. Eve is probably sleeping right now, whichever country she is in, or lying awake thinking about her.

Not dead, though. It isn’t remotely possible.

Villanelle seeks out her accent again, hums it quietly to herself until it’s as natural to her as her Russian. She’s not a huge fan of the American voice, but she’d perfected it with Billie Marie Morgan, practiced the pattern and the flourishes so that it would be convincing.

Because Eve had needed her to be convincing. (She hates that everything seems to lead back to her.)

The stranger across the bar catches her eye for the briefest second, gives a small, polite smile, that is neither suggestive or unfriendly.

Villanelle smiles back brightly, and shrugs off the hardships that surround her, slipping effortlessly into a character that she had crafted on the walk over: Emma, mid-twenties, originally from New York but in town for a while to get away from work stress and also her phone has just died so could I borrow yours for like two seconds?

“Oh, yeah, sure,” is the kind, British response – she hadn’t been expecting that but she can work with it.

“Thank you sooo much,” Villanelle drawls, making a point of gratefully cupping the woman’s shoulder as she takes the phone and steps to the side – enough to make a show of wanting privacy, but not actually far enough away that she should actually get it.

She dials a familiar number, gently guides ‘Emma’ to a place of desolation, of quiet defeat, and by the time she’s met with the answering machine in her ear, she is able to hold control over the masterfully-crafted wobble in her own voice, able to make it bend and break in just the right places so that she appears to be vulnerable. She swallows hard and says she’s sorry, that she messed up, that you didn’t deserve any of it; when her eyes are wet enough, she lets the pretty stranger see them, lets her breath hitch into the phone as she promises to make things right, to be better, to wait for your call when you feel like talking.

If she were to focus hard enough, she could easily pretend she’s telling the truth.

She sniffs when she hangs up, makes her hand tremble slightly for added effect when she hands it back. “Thank you,” she breathes softly, blinking away her tears. “That was super nice of you to do that.”

Pretty Stranger’s smile is small then, almost sheepish, like she might be about to say something that she isn’t entirely sure she should. “No problem,” is what she does say, unhelpfully.

She needs a nudge, an excuse. Villanelle sits down beside her, nods her head at the almost empty martini glass in front of her. “Let me buy your next one?”

“Oh, you don’t have–”

“Please?” Villanelle insists, letting her smile twitch nervously in one corner of her mouth. I’m vulnerable, I’m upset, please let me do this one nice thing.

Pretty Stranger takes the bait, because of course she does. At her nod, Villanelle orders them two apple martinis, reaches out to shake her hand while they wait for them. “I’m Emma.”

“Phoebe,” is the reply, as short and nonchalant as her handshake.

Villanelle sighs into her drink when it comes. She would’ve thought this Phoebe, so thoroughly British, would have been nose-deep in her business by now. Apparently it isn’t going to be quite that easy.

So, ‘Emma’ endeavours to make it easier: sighs heavily, traces her fingers slowly, deliberately over her bracelet, as if it means something to her.

Phoebe notices. “That’s a nice bracelet.”

“Oh, thanks,” Villanelle smiles half-heartedly. “It was a gift.” She makes a show of looking down then, letting her face fall just a little.

Just enough. “You alright?” Phoebe asks.

God bless the British – they just can’t help themselves.

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” Villanelle waves her off, insincerely. “Just-relationships, y’know?”

“All too well,” Phoebe frowns in understanding. “I’ve dated plenty of dickheads in my time.”

“I think in this situation I was the dickhead.”

Phoebe furrows her brow at that, the pretence of being politely detached falling away. “What’d you do? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Villanelle’s response comes easy to her – it’s all she’s thought about for days, after all. “Oh, I…I was trying to help her. She’d gotten into some bad shit and I got her out of it. I made this big plan for us to just get away from it all, y’know?”

“What happened?”

“She left,” Villanelle says, ignoring the way her stomach sinks, the way her chest hurts. “She told me she didn’t love me and that she didn’t believe I loved her.”

Phoebe’s face is priceless in this moment, twisted into such empathy and compassion that Villanelle almost feels bad for manipulating her. Almost. She figures she isn’t really manipulating her, though – Eve had told her those things, had been leaving when Villanelle had turned the gun on her. Not that Phoebe needs to know that part.

Villanelle has never felt prouder of a character – it really does pay off to have life experience, to be honest even if only somewhat. It makes the reaction that little bit sweeter.

“Fuck,” Phoebe murmurs into her martini. Villanelle agrees with the sentiment.

It would be easy now to stray from character, but Villanelle persists, doesn’t let herself rise above the self-pity and the lack of individuality that makes ‘Emma’ so very special. “It was my fault, really,” she murmurs, “I should’ve known better than to pressure her.”

“No, hey,” Phoebe protests, now fully invested. “Don’t do that to yourself.” She sighs then; Villanelle lets her take a second to contemplate her next sentence, ignoring the flicker of triumph in her belly when all sense of boundaries are decidedly foregone. “I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but...well, it sounds like you might be better off out of that.”

‘Emma’ frowns, doesn’t want Phoebe to be right, of course. “It’s really complicated.”

“What’s complicated? I mean, if you don’t want the same things then–”

“We did,” Villanelle blurts pointedly, schooling herself immediately when she realises her accent had almost slipped. “We did,” she repeats, softer, “she just...she’s always been pretty shitty about facing up to herself, I guess.”

And really, truer words have never been spoken.

“Then that’s her problem, and her own loss! Honestly, we have enough shit to deal with all on our own without taking on other people’s problems, too. All this stuff you hear, ‘make the world a more caring place, a problem shared is a problem halved’ – fuck that. The world is full of people who seek to drag down everyone around them so that they can feel validated in their own dark, shitty lives. Well fuck that. I know who I am, I own it, I’m handling mine. If you know who you are, what you want, why wait around for someone who only holds you back and may never even feel the same way that you do anyway?”

Villanelle blinks, once, twice, then takes a long sip of her drink, as Phoebe’s words filter and sink through her mind. It reminds her of the speech she had given as Billie at the AA meeting in London; while hers had certainly been honest, open, it pales in comparison to Phoebe’s. Hers feels real, and maybe that’s because Phoebe knows when she’s telling the truth, can own it in a way that Villanelle can’t. She still wonders sometimes if she’d meant anything she’d said that day, figures she must have, on some level.

She hadn’t been expecting such an impassioned plea, but now that it’s out there, she ponders it hard. It makes sense, objectively, sounds reminiscent of her own world view before Eve – while her general outlook on life has always remained the same, Villanelle would be remiss if she did not confess that that outlook had shifted since Eve, became greater, fuller, deeper than she could’ve ever imagined.

She’d thought that Eve would share her desires, would realise finally in Rome that they were the same, that they needed each other, that they were meant for each other. But Eve had been a coward. Eve had let her down. Could Phoebe be right? What’s the point in this big, improved mindset when it’s based on a false belief? Why should she have to suffer for Eve’s stupidity?

“You know what?” ‘Emma’ says. “You’re right.”

“Yeah!”

“I should stop torturing myself!”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah, she made her bed,” Villanelle nods, more to herself than to Phoebe, lifting her glass to her lips. “She can die in it.”

Phoebe laughs. “No, that’s–thats not the expression.”

“What?”

“It’s ‘lie’. Like, lie in bed?”

“Right,” Villanelle blinks. “That’s what I meant, obviously.”

She drinks back the urge to laugh, winds up finishing her martini off.

“So,” she murmurs, leaning in ever so slightly, allowing her smile to take on a different meaning. “What would you suggest I do now?”

Phoebe’s eyes flutter then – Villanelle almost misses the way she glances at her lips, but as it stands, she doesn’t. She’s always had an eye for detail.

“Well,” Phoebe starts softly, clearing her throat before smiling. “I recommend three things.”

“Mm.”

“One,” and she holds up her index finger, “a new vibrator, because you can never go wrong with a new vibrator. Two,” and she holds up her middle finger, “a clear-out. Get rid of all the shit you can’t stand anymore.”

Villanelle leans in then, allows her fingers to rise and snag Phoebe’s ring finger as it extends to join the other two. Her smile turns predatory, and her voice drops two octaves, a deliberate trap to ensnare the other woman, a trap she already knows will succeed. “And three?”

Three, Phoebe finds, is the best she’s ever had. She’s reduced to breathless pants, gasping moans, doesn’t have to beg more or harder because Villanelle is always one step ahead of her, pressing her into the wall of her bedroom and never slowing down, driving her up, up, up, until suddenly she’s clenching and calling out for a woman who doesn’t exist.

Villanelle appreciates her own names, has never bothered much with anyone else’s. Until Eve, of course, and from then every woman who entered her bed had shared her namesake.

When Villanelle climaxes exactly thirteen minutes later, it’s with a low cry, and Phoebe’s name on her lips. She can almost pretend she doesn’t feel Eve’s hair on her inner thighs.

But it’s unnatural, and more than that’s it’s wrong, so very wrong. No sooner has Villanelle recovered than she is reaching for her sweater and her house keys. Phoebe, in a ditzy, orgasmic haze, follows her to the door, murmurs things like “amazing” and “call me” and “let’s do this again”. She doesn’t sound as smart anymore.

“Sorry,” Villanelle says, stepping out into the night with a smile like honey. “My girlfriend will be here soon.”

It won’t be long. It never is.

Her bed welcomes her fifteen minutes later, softer than it’s ever been before. Her phone lights up on the nightstand, just out of the corner of her eye. When she reaches for it, an update on one of her games flashes up on the screen, as does a voicemail left for her at 9:22pm that same evening. She sighs softly while she listens to to her own voice back, lets herself smile. She really is extremely talented.

As the voicemail ends, a chime sounds in her ear, indicating the arrival of another notification. It’s from a red app, lined with white – Sky News, she realises (when had she turned news alerts on for Sky News?).

The headline flashes up, bold and screaming and mocking. ‘MI6 AGENT FOUND DEAD IN ROMAN RUIN.’

Villanelle’s blood runs cold. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments are appreciated!


	3. Quietus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve makes an important choice about her marriage, in amongst some plot-thickening.

_quietus: [noun] – an end, or final settlement_

If Eve could have chosen, it would have been Shoreditch.

Mayfair probably would’ve been the more obvious choice, or Greenwich or Kensington; all places a little more suited to the older, professional woman. But Shoreditch is cool, refreshing, vibrant, teeming with artists and hipsters and spirited young people; everything that Eve had been missing in her life for so long. Plus, she already knew the underground route, had memorised it from when she had visited Villanelle at her MI6 apartment in the morning before work.

To discuss Aaron Peel, obviously. Why else would she have taken the underground eighteen stops from Ealing Broadway, changed once at Liverpool Street and then walked ten minutes from Shoreditch High Street?

It had been for work.

Carolyn tells her, as they’re leaving Rome behind on a government-issued private jet, that killing Eve is going to be quick and neat, and that the packing up of her house at 39 Piccadilly Street is to begin both that same day and without her help – handing her a notepad and a pen, Carolyn tells Eve to make a list of everything she would like MI6 to “recover” for her (Eve, feeling petty, fills two A4 pages, front and back). It had, by now, occurred to Eve that she would of course have to relocate – a fairly essential part of the whole ‘disappearing’ thing – but she’d hoped to sneak one last visit to the place she’d called home, before she never sees it again. She had lived there for years, and it had been a happy home, once, even if the memory of that feels far-reached now. She’d thought she’d at least have time to process and plan before her life was snatched from under her.

No need to plan, though, Carolyn has everything in hand, and really, three hours in the air ought to be more than enough time to process, right?

Maybe Eve could have reconciled things had she been given any say in where she was going. She’d wanted Shoreditch, had expected Mayfair. She’s utterly unimpressed when her train ticket comes through that day reading Watford Junction.

Fucking North Watford? It’s not even London, it’s _Hertfordshire_. What the Hell is there to do in _Hertfordshire_?

She shouldn’t complain, though – MI6 have arranged everything, secured her a cute two-bedroom maisonette in the Knutsford area (which is, apparently, an increasingly sought after development spot) and taken care of all the things she would have no doubt forgotten about herself: the mail, her money, her Facebook page. They give her a clean phone, linked to a new, generously endorsed bank account under her maiden name ‘Eve Park’, and wipe her laptop – the Twelve are meticulous, they say, best not to take any chances.

Eve doesn’t have to do anything, really, other than sort through her shit as it’s brought to her in boxes and decide what’s coming with her into this new, dead life of hers.

It does occur to Eve, as she’s folding up her comfiest sweatersin Carolyn’s living room, that perhaps her husband will be coming with her into this new, dead life of hers. He is expected to show face today, had left a message on Carolyn’s answering machine that morning asking for Eve’s new number and announcing his intention to “drop round after school”. He sounds far too calm, far too nonchalant, and Eve is so irked by it that she thinks she will accidentally confuse two digits in her new number when giving it to him.

It does, though, unsettle her how little she’s spared him a thought in the last few days, the last few weeks and months. That really isn’t all his fault; sure, they had had their problems for a while and it was all bound to come crashing down eventually, but the events of the last year certainly hadn’t helped matters. Konstantin had been right, that day in this same living room Eve now finds herself in alone — Villanelle had forced her way into her brain, eaten up everyone and everything else until she was all that was left, a tattoo behind Eve’s eyes that she loathes and would loathe to be without. When she thinks of her now she sees red, furious, the colour of a revolution, hears her name being screamed back at her in perfect heartbreak before _bang_ and then–

But she’s resolved not to think about her anymore, and she’s going to try a damn sight harder not to this time around. Konstantin, apparently, shares her outlook – Carolyn tells her he is with his family once more, in hiding until the whole Rome business blows over. He is leaving that life behind and moving on, somewhere in Canada, apparently.

 _A stone’s throw from Alaska,_ Eve thinks absent-mindedly, catching herself and scolding herself because it is entirely possible that all roads do not lead back to Villanelle.

Somehow, however, they still do. Eve goes over Carolyn’s words in her head repeatedly - _that bullet couldn’t have killed a dog_. Had Villanelle planned this? Was there more to this seemingly impulsive choice than simply being an angry response to rejection? Villanelle had called Carolyn – had she done so to save her life? Or to have her dead body be recovered rotting and forgotten?

Was it an impulsive choice at all? Or had Villanelle always known what she would have to do?

The more terrifying scenario was that Villanelle had figured it all out in a matter of seconds - had shrugged off Eve’s words and turned calculating, logical. By shooting her, Villanelle had taken her out of the Twelve’s peripheral, landed her back with MI6 where the paperwork was already being drawn up to make Eve Polastri disappear forever. She’d be safe now, back home, for the rest of her life - not quite as she’d envisioned but still - and, as much as it pains her to admit, it gives credence to what Carolyn had said before:

Villanelle had done her a favour. She’d given Eve an out, an escape from all of it, even if she hadn’t intended to.

(Had she intended to?)

Eve wonders for most of the day, until all that’s left to choose from are CDs and books - if she’d meant it, did that mean she was nearby, waiting in the shadows, watching her? Did she still want her? Did Eve want that to be true?

Because if not, if Villanelle had truly been so angry that she’d shot Eve and never looked back, then Eve would have to conclude that she’ll never see her again, and that sticks more uncomfortably in her body than any bullet ever could.

But Eve has resolved not to think about her anymore. It’ll pass, she’s sure, like everything else. She ought to instead be focusing on this new, dead life of hers, and deciding whether or not she will be living it alone.

“I hate to rush you,” Carolyn had said, “but it’ll require a good deal more paperwork if I’m to move both of you.”

It would be easier to go alone.

_God, that’s awful. True, but awful._

Niko, ever a man of perfect time-keeping, rings the doorbell to Carolyn’s charming townhouse exactly fifteen minutes after schools let out for the day. Paul the Security Guard lets him in, after a brief, relatively-non-threatening interrogation about the reason for his visit; it gives Eve the few extra seconds that she needs to steel herself, stand up against the dull twinge in her back, and clasp her hands together in nervous apprehension at seeing the man she’d married after all this time apart.

He looks older, is her first thought; his hair is untidy, longer, greying at the roots. His moustache is uneven and wiry. He is bleary-eyed and unshaven. He certainly _looks_ as if he’s recently been incarcerated, and in his eyes Eve does think she can see the shadow of Gemma’s asphyxiation. Terror lingers there, a memory that no doubt haunts him at night, keeping him from sleep.

Eve’s heart aches for him, really it does. But it’s not like he’s come straight from the police station – he could have shaved.

They stare at one another for several seconds, separated by ten feet of space that seems to stretch wider than the the whole of London, and it becomes painfully clear to Eve in this moment just how much has happened, what has passed between them, the gravity of it all. Anything she could think of to say now wouldn’t feel appropriate or just.

“Hi,” he says.

She can almost pretend it’ll be that easy.

“Hi,” she breathes out, leaves that out there on its own for a moment before edging into more complex territory. “How’ve you been?”

“Oh, y’know,” he shrugs, shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and blows his cheeks out like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Eve blinks. “I – actually don’t.” She really ought to feel guilty about that, but it’s difficult when he looks so damn _uninterested_.

“How do you _think_ I’ve been, Eve?”

That’s fair, she supposes. “I…okay, I–”

“My friend was murdered in front of me and I spent two nights in jail but really I–”

“I said okay,” she sighs sharply, in no mood for an argument. The pain in her back makes her mind murky and she could do without the aggravation. “Do you–do you want some tea, or?”

“No, no tea.”

She’s only half-joking when she suggests “vodka?”

“Don’t tempt me,” he sighs out, trying to smile. It’s meant to be funny, she’s sure, but it just isn’t. It’s said with such seriousness that Eve just feels awkward, and suddenly compelled to say–

“You look tired.”

“I am. Very.” He looks at her then, properly for the first time since his arrival. His eyes linger on her shoulder, the hand she keeps over the bandage there. “You aren’t looking so hot yourself.”

Instinctively, she splays her palm flatter. “Yeah, well.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Not much. A little.”

Niko hums then – and oh, it’s not disinterest that Eve has been seeing. He’s _smug._ She can feel him judging her, can hear the _‘I told you so’_ screaming to be let out from inside his mind, and it pisses her off but she sets it aside. She really doesn’t want an argument. “We have a lot to talk about, so we should probably–”

“Yeah,” he nods, forcing a smile. “Yeah, we should.”

She sits down then (it’s a blessed relief), motions with her hand for him to take the spot next to her on the couch.

No sooner are they seated is Niko speaking, quickly and succinctly. “I think we should go to Watford, together.”

Eve blinks. She hadn’t been expecting that.

Her face must give her away, for he turns his body to face her fully, starts talking with his hands in big, emotive gestures. “Just-hear me out, okay? I know it’s been hard, and I know we’ve had our issues–”

“‘Issues’ is a bit of an understatement, Niko.”

“Nevertheless, I think…I don’t think we should throw away what we have.” He frowns softly, as if what he’s feeling most of all is confusion as to how they’d drifted apart. “Ten years we’ve been married, Eve – there’s got to be something still worth saving. Or, at least, I think there is. I still love you, Eve, in spite of everything.”

“Well, thank you,” Eve deadpans with a frown, “you’re really too kind.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, I think you did.”

He sighs, reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be so defensive. I’m trying to talk to you, I want us to be able to work this out.”

It seems to occur to him then, that perhaps he is the only one who wants that. “Don’t _you_?” He frowns, his voice flirting with the line between nervousness and horrified disbelief.

Eve blinks, opens her mouth but finds her throat has gone dry. Deep inside, her stomach starts to churn, twisting into guilty knots as a million things rush through her mind to say, things she’s desperate to say, things she really _shouldn’t_ say. She could lie, take the easy road, _of course that’s what I want darling, let’s start over, let’s work it out._

But her stomach hurts with how much it’s twisting, and she has to wonder if that’s really what she wants, and maybe, deep down, he feels the same. Hadn’t he already left? Hadn’t he already made it clear that their interests had become unaligned?

Through the tightness of her throat, she asks “What’s changed?” She needs to know the root of his sudden desire for reconciliation.

He stares blankly back at her, looking so unbelievably dumb that her stomach starts contracting harder. “What has actually changed here, Niko?” she presses.

He narrows an eyebrow, folds his arms across his chest somewhat indignantly. “Quite a lot has changed, Eve.”

“Like what?” She’s insistent now. “Every reason you had for leaving is still there, is it not?”

“I want us to move past all that,” he reasons. “I want us to be good again.”

She can’t help herself – she barks out a bitter laugh, throws her hands out to the side. “How can we be!? How can we be when you’re constantly waiting for me to be someone I’m not? When you’re always saying that you want your wife to come back?”

“I _do_ want my wife to come back,” he snaps.

She bites back a groan, sighs instead and folds her arms defiantly over her own chest. “If that’s true then I think you have an unrealistic understanding of who I actually am.”

He doesn’t like that; Eve can tell from his face before he’s even responding. “That’s bullshit, Eve. You are the kindest, best person I know. But you’ve had your head turned, by all of this spying and the lies and that _fucking_ woman–”

And really, fuck not wanting an argument. “My head has not been _turned_ , Niko,” she protests, firmly like she’s offended by the mere suggestion. “This is who I am, who I’ve always been.”

“No, it’s not. She made you this way, Eve, she wanted to ruin us–”

“Don’t,” Eve snaps. “Don’t bring her into this.” Fuck not wanting an argument. She’s angry enough without the thought of that infuriating, psychotic, gorgeous fucking _asshole_ fuelling her on.

“Eve–”

“ _No_ ,” she interjects abruptly. “We had our problems long before Villanelle, so don’t use her now to explain away everything that has gone wrong.”

“She _is_ the reason!” he exclaims, springing up off the couch. “Gemma is dead! Christ Eve, you were shot!”

“You think I don’t know that!?”

“Do you!?” And he’s angry now, angrier than Eve thinks she’s ever seen him; his eyes are wide and wild, and his fists are trembling. “She nearly killed you, Eve, and you’re standing there defending her!”

“I am not!”

“Wake up! She is a terrible, awful person!”

“So am I!”

“She’s a murderer!”

“ _So am I_!”

And then, it’s quiet. Leaving that out there on its own leaves Eve feeling naked, terrified, more honest than she’s ever felt in her life. It’s horrific, sickening, makes her heart pound, her blood race, makes her feel panicked and scared and dizzy and nauseous and–

Free.

So fucking free.

She realises now that she’s standing, doesn’t even feel the pain of her injury as she holds her husband’s gaze, breathing shakily through the realisation that while she is panicked and naked and all of those things, she is completely and utterly in control. For the first time in a long time, she is honest. She holds nothing back.

She’d forgotten what it felt like.

“Stop it,” Niko whispers, looking so incredibly torn. “Don’t do this, Eve.”

Her breath hitches then, the sound dry and raspy as her eyes start to shine, as she grabs hold of the only truth about herself that’s left, the one thing she can say with certainty. “I killed someone, Niko. In Rome. I picked up an axe, counted to three inside my head and I ended his life in two swings.”

_Red, spurting. I was thinking we should go to Alaska._

He closes his mouth and swallows hard – she remembers the vomit in her own throat after Raymond, wonders briefly if he’s going to be sick. Instead, he takes a breath, stares hard at her as he tries, commendably, to justify it all:

“Did she make you do it?”

And Eve can’t help but laugh, however humourlessly, her voice choked and wet as it hits her that he’s probably going to hate her, but still it’s not enough to stop her. “I did it _for_ her,” she whispers, a tear escaping down her cheek. “To save her life.”

With this final loathsome confession, everything suddenly feels very final. She can see in his eyes, clear as day, the way he’s shutting down, closing himself off to her forever. That twisting, churning pain in her stomach, she realises, is heavier now, but it hurts an awful lot less than it did. Now, it is just that – heavy – and she realises that this must be what it feels like to let go.

“That worked out well for you, then,” he says lowly, mockingly, almost growling.

His words don’t even hurt, and when she does hurt, it’s her wound, but she holds herself up, fights off the urge to collapse down onto the couch. She will see this through, pain be damned. She won’t give him reason to be proven right.

“I really thought we could fix this,” he tells her, as he shakes his head in (what can only be) shame and heads for the door. “But I don’t even recognise you anymore.”

“I never wanted any of this.” It’s probably only half-true, but it’s all she can offer – she can’t bring herself to apologise. She probably should, but she’s not sure if it would be genuine – she really isn’t all that kind.

Had she ever really been?

He lets out a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “No. Of course not.”

And then he’s leaving, sniping “you and Villanelle deserve each other” as he walks out of her life forever, and when he is gone, Eve finally gives in to her pain, clutches at her shoulder and groans out hard as she sinks back down onto the couch. Her face is hot, wet with tears as they come in trickles down her cheeks, but it isn’t sadness that she feels.

Relief is not quite the right word for it either. She floats somewhere in between, lighter in spite of herself. Perhaps she ought to feel hollower at the prospect of life without Niko, feel nervous at the idea of being alone.

 _“But you aren’t alone, are you?”_ he’d said once, and no, she hadn’t been then. It’s becoming clearer to her that she most probably is now.

But still, it’ll pass, she’s sure. Like everything else.

On the coffee table, her phone lights up, displaying a new message from ‘Carolyn Martens’. It reads:

“Everything is ready. Just say the word.”

Eve sighs a little, doesn’t mean to laugh but it rings that way anyway. “Let’s kill me,” she responds, chuckling that bit harder as two more tears slide down her face. She had expected it to hurt more, to interfere almost violently with her headspace.

Instead, all she can think about is Rome, the birds and the _bang_ and _I love you, I do, you’re mine_.

She’s always made a point of arriving early at airports and train stations, always just a little bit anxious that her meticulously-planned schedule would somehow become thwarted and she’d end up needing the extra time. For the most part, that’s why she arrives the next day at Euston station one hour before her train is set to depart for Watford Junction. It is perhaps also, in part, because of how quiet Carolyn’s house had been – the woman had been at the office well into the night, and Kenny hadn’t come home at all. Staying with a friend, Carolyn had said. Eve had briefly wondered if he has a girlfriend, or if he simply just can’t stand to be around her anymore.

Maybe it’s both. Either way, Eve hasn’t seen him since before Rome, and it saddens her now to realise that their paths will likely never cross again.

Everything is waiting for her at the other side, sent ahead of her as discreetly as possible in only one moving van. Her new house in the Knutsford area has already been swept thoroughly by an MI6 security team, fitted with a state-of-the-art alarm system and a combination-lock safe. There are even two panic buttons, one under the breakfast bar in the kitchen and one on her beside table, hidden in the lampshade. Chances are she won’t need them, she’s told, but nevertheless they’re there, just in case.

The scenarios sparked by the phrase ‘just in case’ have tormented her all day; in the bathroom while she’d showered, in her Uber, in the queue at WHSmith, and they still plague her now while she sits mindlessly waiting for her platform number to be announced. Her train leaves at 2pm – by 1:40pm, she’s yawning, exhausted, and the thought of the Twelve finding her, home-invading and torturing and murdering her, doesn’t seem so terrifying anymore. Much as it pains her, she knows she has to trust Carolyn, trust MI6. She’ll be safe where she’s going – alone, but safe. After all, what people are going to waste their time looking for a woman who’s already dead?

It’s the last shred of rationality she thinks she has left.

When 2pm finally arrives, the train pulls out of the station, set to make perfect time and have Eve in Watford Junction within the next half hour. She gazes out of the window, studies the tracks and the buildings and the greenery for all of four minutes before she grows restless, bored in much the same way as the child seated six rows in front of her; he squirms and huffs in frustration, grumbles that he’s hungry and it isn’t fair.

Eve thinks she can relate, spares a thought for the boy’s mother. In a way, she’s glad she and Niko never had kids – though he’d always expressed a desire, she was never nearly patient enough, and the timing had never been right. Just as well, really – she’s not sure she would’ve been strong enough to hold a family together this last year.

Or lose one, as the case may be.

Eager to distract herself from her thoughts, Eve reaches over to the seat beside her and unzips her handbag, rifling inside for her Kindle. In searching for it, her fingers slip through her mail, bills and general junk that she still means to sort through. She hasn’t had a proper look at the bundle, had been failing to see the off-white envelope with the red raven seal, wedged between her broadband bill and her last bank statement.

She sees it now, however, bright and distinctive at the bottom of her bag. Holding it in her hands, she sees the Ealing address, handwritten in delicate cursive under the most beautifully calligraphed ‘Eve Polastri’ that she’s ever seen.

Already her heart is stuttering over beats; her palms are warm with sweat as she slips the letter out of the envelope, unfolding it.

The boy screams for chocolate six rows away. A station is announced. Eve hears none of it.

The letter is a poem, penned in the same smooth-flowing cursive:

_The art of losing isn’t hard to master;_

_so many things seem filled with the intent_

_to be lost that their loss is no disaster._

_Lose something every day. Accept the fluster_

_of lost door keys, the hour badly spent._

_The art of losing isn’t hard to master._

_Then practice losing farther, losing faster:_

_places, and names, and where it was you meant_

_to travel. None of these will bring disaster._

_I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or_

_next-to-last, of three loved houses went._

_The art of losing isn’t hard to master._

_I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,_

_some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent._

_I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster._

_—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture_

_I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident_

_the art of losing’s not too hard to master_

_though it may look like (_ Write it! _) like disaster._

Eve reads it twice, and then again, the world growing hazy around her. Abruptly, she shoves the letter away from her onto the table, fumbles for her phone and brings up Google Chrome. She jabs her thumbs against the screen until she’s searching the words ‘poem’ and ‘losing’ and ‘disaster’, swallows down the sudden sense of foreboding that’s causing her blood to itch.

There are nearly eighteen million results, but Eve clicks onto the first, a comprehensive analysis of the poem ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop. The rendition of the poem matches the letter word-for-word, and underneath, a university student has provided their own heavily approved interpretation of what they think the author meant.

They cite loss, pain; losing over and over again a plethora of tiny, unimportant things which become huge, irreplaceable things. But ultimately people can rationalise everything, choose to weigh the loss of their lover against the loss of their house keys because that way, it hurts less. The pain is manageable, compartmentalised. Eve reads with a tight throat, tears pressing behind her eyes so fiercely she’s scared to blink, her heart slamming inside her chest as she scrolls up higher.

Under ‘Further Notes’, she finds techniques, commentaries, more themes, and then, at the bottom, three small bullet points, which have her bursting into loud, delirious sobs in the middle of her busy Watford-bound train.

_Stanzas: 6_

_Lines: 19_

_Structure = Villanelle._

In a picturesque lake-house over four thousand miles away, Irina Vasiliev collects the mail that has gathered on the welcome mat over the course of that morning. She hopes for the new edition of the Russian teen magazine _Shonqar_ , having already read everything that had come packed into the in-home library; unfortunately, it’s all adult stuff, bills and reminders and a yellowish envelope with a crimson seal. She supposes she will have to re-read ‘The Orange Clock’.

She takes the bundle to the living room, where her father sits in front of the television, nursing a whiskey in a proper glass. He breaks the red raven seal and reads – Irina can see the way his face changes, turning stormy and frustrated.

“ _Jebati_ ,” Konstantin growls under his breath – it is not Russian, likely so as to shield his daughter, but Irina knows enough Serbian to know what he said.

He takes out his phone then, still grumbling, and hopes the eight-hour time difference will not much matter to Carolyn Martens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments are appreciated!


	4. Saudade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Villanelle reels in the news of Eve's 'death', with some bloody consequences, and sets a path for vengeance.  
> Happy New Year, everybody!!

_saudade: [noun] – a nostalgic longing for something lost_

_“Not a silly little moment … not the storm before the calm …”_

Warm water cascades over her shoulders, streaking silver pathways down the undersides of her arms, falling from her fingertips.“ _This is the deep and dying breath of … mmm working on …_ ” Guitar strings and a smooth alto soul clash against the crashing and the steam and her quiet, melodic murmurs – she sings to ignore the rushing of her mind, points a pinky, slightly pruned, at the tile wall like an upside-down finger gun, and flicks up with a _“phewoosh”,_ effectively shooting through a small cluster of soap suds.

It’s the smallest gun in the world, but the suds split apart anyway. Things are, apparently, more fragile than they would appear.

Villanelle closes her eyes and opens her mouth to receive the shower spray, lets it swell and rise until its pouring out over her chin, dribbling down her collarbones as her head dips. She had expected to cry in here, and she’s lingering, giving herself the chance to. She runs her fingers over her stomach, over the pretty pink blemish that she knows will never go away, and focuses all her effort on the pain inside her. Her chest aches where her heart is, but her eyes don’t sting. Why can’t she cry?

It could be down to the persistent aftermath of a hangover she can’t remember wanting to fall into. Everything is orange and loud and crashing water on her uncomfortable skin; pieces of a picture and a dry mouth, as she slow dances in burning heat. She should cry, she thinks – she’ll feel better if she does.

But she’s been in here too long already; the soap has long since been rinsed off, and John Mayer has since faded away.

“You were ages,” a soft English voice murmurs from the bed when Villanelle steps back into the room. They are as naked as each other. “Are you okay?”

Villanelle’s little Alaskan home has been claustrophobically quiet since Eve died, even though she’d never been here, but Phoebe’s presence has been somewhat of a safeguard. The tingling of skin-on-skin, the lips that drag silver pathways across her body like water from the shower-head, has almost been as desensitising as the dark isolation of her bedroom, distracting Villanelle from the gnawing void inside her, the confusion, the questions, the anger.

It is mostly anger. Her lungs don’t work properly and her words don’t work nicely and her veins are angry all the time. It’s easier to drink, or fuck, or sing, even if it isn’t with Eve, because there are no words in any language that Villanelle can think of that could aptly describe the way she feels.

She just _feels_ , a lot, and it’s intense and suffocating and it makes her so goddamn _angry_.

Villanelle says nothing, simply climbs on top of Phoebe and dips her hand between her legs, swallowing the soft sigh that slips out into the slip of space between them.

Fuck Eve for ruining everything. Fuck Eve for dying. Fuck Eve for leaving her.

She’ll drink and fuck and sing until it doesn’t hurt anymore, and if she’s sweaty enough after Phoebe comes, she can take another shower, try her hand at crying again.

At the Wise Bear that night, Villanelle drinks alone, deep and desperate until her tongue is numb and her mind slurs contemplation at her. She drinks vodka, double measures at a time, eventually leaves out the coke mixer because it’s only getting in the way, really. Her brain turns looser, uncoupled, and she thinks things she hasn’t thought of for a while, sees places she’d been before, faces of people she’d almost forgotten. She sees all of this in vibrant colour, bright and complicated, as if seeing it all for the first time. How had she seen these things, these places, these people, originally? Where had the bright, complicated colours been then?

Books and music and Anna had taught her that love and pain were mutually exclusive, two inevitable experiences drawn together and bound for the sole purpose of leaving someone hollow and without hope. She wonders, then, if she and Eve had been likewise – two sides of the same coin that never should have come face to face, and from the first moment their eyes had met in that bathroom in London the universe had had to shift just enough to stop the world from spinning off its axis.

Is the world hollow now, she wonders? Is the world without hope?

No, she has to conclude. It is only her – here alone without her secondary element – who has lost anything tonight.

Perhaps alcohol would have finally driven Eve to her truth, would have pooled inside her brain and dragged her to her knees to worship in adoring, explicit confession at the apex of Villanelle’s thighs. Phoebe can try, _does_ try, and though Villanelle cannot make the comparison, she’s still sure that Eve would’ve been the best sex of her life. They could’ve burned down the world together.

Fuck Eve for taking that chance away from them.

The Wise Bear is hundreds of conversations being had in loud voices, all of them in competition with a heavy rock ’n’ roll music backdrop; the crowd are a steely mix of pint-drinking older men and college students; people from all walks of life all jammed into one room,moving and laughing and touching and clashing. It’s stifling, uncomfortable, but Villanelle is six drinks in so where her skin would normally be crawling with irritation, she finds now that she can’t find it in her to care all that much.

Sudden warmth against her back tells Villanelle that Phoebe has arrived into the fray, and sure enough, a soft English hum brushes against her ear. “Hi, you.”

Suddenly there isn’t enough alcohol in America to chase away the spiders under Villanelle’s flesh. But still, she’s an actress, so she smiles and allows the kiss that’s pressed to her cheek, fights like hell to ignore how wrong it feels. “How was your day?” ‘Emma’ asks, her accent sweet and Manhattan-rich.

Phoebe grumbles, slides into the vacant bar stool beside her. “Long. I need a drink.”

Villanelle is already signalling the bartender over, putting in her order for her seventh vodka double of the evening. It still might not be enough.

Phoebe, to her credit, catches up quickly, grows giggly and ditzy, lets her fingers wander over Villanelle’s arm and thigh. Villanelle, meanwhile, can feel herself dissociating, sinking into the void of her own body, anchored to the earth only by her feet and the weight of her memories on her shoulders. The things, the places, the people, they are blurred now, out-of-focus, but still Villanelle can touch them, smell them, taste them. Her throat burns and her eyes are pink but still, they are there. Persistent through the haze.

Eve is still there — beautiful and wild and screaming, and when Phoebe talks, it clashes with Eve’s voice in her ears, that deep, sensual voice saying her name, calling her an asshole, telling her she needs her.

She’ll never hear that voice again. Vodka doesn’t make that go away, and Phoebe’s own voice is no replacement. No match. 

She sounds like Carolyn, Villanelle realises. It infuriates her.

They end up back at Phoebe’s apartment sometime after nine, but it’s wrong; the walls move in waves and it’s a hundred degrees and Phoebe’s hands feel like boulders, rolling over her chest to crush her to the bed, to snuff her out from the universe.

Suddenly Phoebe is the Devil on top of her, snarling and strong and threatening, and it snaps something inside of Villanelle. She feels it immediately; the darkness coming over her, rearranging her brain, making her skin come alive. It burns and boils inside her, grows and spreads like hateful, furious fire, and suddenly she’s slamming Phoebe down with a surge of adrenaline, and grabbing the knife from where she’s been keeping it hidden at the small of her back.

The passage of light slows, and the sounds become as if underwater. That pounding inside beats a rhythm to the words of her execution, the cold steel of her fury and her blade. It slices into Phoebe’s body as if she’s nothing, just meat and blood and bones; her face, so pretty in life, is frozen now, getting greyer, and she holds Villanelle’s eyes, her own wide and wild and panicked until suddenly they’re dull, made of glass, empty.

Villanelle growls against her, punches the knife harder into her stomach, over and over and again and again, reaching desperately and frantically for something she can’t name. There’s blood everywhere, pooling and dripping and congealing around her on the bed; it’s on her face and under her fingernails, and her clothes are soaked with it but she won’t stop, can’t stop, doesn’t until the stench of copper is too overpowering and her arm has gone numb with the ache.

She rolls onto her back in the blood, lets the knife drop from her fingertips onto the floor with a dull clatter, and sighs out into the stink and deathly quiet.

The desire, the power, the anger inside her, is gone, ebbed away like the light in Phoebe’s eyes, the breath in her lungs. All that’s left for Villanelle is all there has been since Eve had died – nothing, but the inexplicable anger that she cannot _cannot_ reach no matter how much she drinks or fucks or sings or apparently kills; it’s so intense and all-consuming that it guts her, leaves her unbearably, unendingly, and irrevocably hollow.

She closes her eyes, focuses on the warm wetness around her and tries to remember a time when she could hardly feel anything at all. Her thoughts turn back to Eve. Would she have been buried? Would she have been cremated? Maybe she would have given her hole in the ground to some other poor bastard and become herself a tree or a bench or some shit – everyone would have expected that, ‘ _oh that was our Eve, always thinking of others, even at the end_!’

Villanelle calls bullshit – she knows for a fact Eve would have taken the goddamn grave for herself, and why shouldn’t she have? She had earned it, after all.

If Eve had lived, Alaska might have been beautiful. It’s something Villanelle thinks about until she falls asleep, Phoebe’s body growing stiff beside her.

She dreams of Konstantin that night, for the first time in a long while. In her mind’s eye, he is leaving her again, telling her to take the car and flee, telling her to abandon Eve, telling her that they are not family. She blinks awake in the dark, angry. Fuck him for betraying her. Fuck him for turning his back on her. They had been friends, they had been a good team! And he had screwed her over. He probably thought he’d done her a favour, giving her a heads up in Rome. But fuck him – he’d put the Twelve on her trail in the first place. He’d left her there, Eve too.

If only he could see her now, she thinks, as she finds herself in her Audi, driving on the outskirts of town, blood and sex under her fingernails. If only he could see that she’s doing fine without him.

The thought festers in her mind, the memory of that awful moment and its consequences, and it grows deeper and darker and angrier until she’s clenching the steering wheel and crushing the speed limit and all she can hear is Konstantin’s voice in her head, _we are not family, we are not family, we are not family._

She growls in angry Russian, curses and grumbles and spits until finally, _finally,_ the tears come, thick and hot and fast down her face. But she keeps driving, faster and angrier through blurred vision, and when she tears back into Anchorage twenty minutes later, her mind is in overdrive, focused entirely on one thing only:

_I will find you and your family._

Her new laptop – the latest edition MacBook Air in gold – is ordered that same Wednesday evening, and arrives on the Friday morning. It’s faster than her previous model; she can’t help but note as she sets it up that it would’ve been an even handier tool to have when she’d been under the Twelve’s employ. That time in her life – her apartment in Paris, her pretty postcards, her first-class tickets to all over Europe – seems like forever ago now.

How much simpler everything had been, before Eve. Before Konstantin had thrown her to the wolves.

He’ll pay for it. He’ll be sorry that he ever crossed her. 

In this, the Information Age, finding someone online has never been easier; search someone’s full name, a million results may be returned; fine-tune the search to add date of birth, and the result pool cuts in half. Any other information you can find – last known address, place of work, hobbies, associates – can refine the search down, down, down, until finally you’re left with a profile.

Konstantin Vasiliev, however, had never been ‘profile-appropriate’ – when he hadn’t been Russian Intelligence, he’d been the Twelve’s middle man, and then he’d been both, and now he’s…what, neither? In any case, he is as he has always been, as _she_ has always been – a ghost. Completely under the radar. (Besides, it’s not like it would’ve worked anyway – Villanelle never did learn when his birthday is.)

She tries newspapers, English and Russian, tries social media even though the idea of Konstantin having an Instagram account is utterly laughable. It’s no surprise that neither venture turns up anything useful, but it is frustrating nonetheless – she’s never been one for patience, and with nothing left of Eve but her memory, the gaps left behind in her brain have filled quicker than ever with the thought of exacting cold, delicious vengeance on the man she’d once considered her friend. How satisfying it will be to watch the spark drain from his eyes, to snuff out his fat wife, to choke the breath from his annoying arsehole of a daughter.

But first, to find him. It’s frustrating.

It’s so frustrating that whiskey doesn’t help, only serves to burn and leave her with the distressed sense of a headache behind her eyes, not helped by the glare of her laptop in the dark. Still, it numbs her bones so she opens a bottle of Pinot Grigio, drinks it while she eats dinner in bed – the same shit, bland fish – and stares as blankly at the insulting white screen as it stares back at her.

She rationalises, closes her eyes and chews thoughtfully around the rich taste in her mouth. It occurs to her that Eve’s hacker friend, the boy, would be most useful right about now. She wonders if he had been in on it, too, with Carolyn and Konstantin and all of MI6. Had he too conspired to tear her and Eve apart? Had he known that Konstantin would betray her? How long had she been in the dark?

The house is adequately dark but far too quiet, so Villanelle sets out in search for a sanctuary, where she can scream and not be heard. Club Ange finds her downtown, twenty minutes away – it’s wall-to-wall people, electric and smoky and sweaty, and the floor rumbles under her boots. Her synapses jump like beans in a tin, and finally, crushed among perfect strangers, she can allow herself to think clearly.

One such stranger, short and rude and giggly, shuffles past Villanelle, slurring her words at the girl she’s with. Villanelle lets her go without a word, too entranced by her hair to be angry.

It’s orange; not a bright orange, more soft, like the sunset. Had Villanelle been at home, suffocating in the silence, she may not have been reminded of Irina Vasiliev. But here — with the music and the chatter proving deafening — her brain makes the connection easily.

Back at the house — after another several hours of drinking and one mediocre bathroom hook-up — Villanelle drags her MacBook back into her lap and begins her search anew, this time for the youngest Vasiliev. It takes an hour of sifting through countless social media pages before finally, hidden away amongst the various spellings, is a Facebook profile belonging to one ‘Irïñaa Väž’.

Villanelle isn’t convinced it’s her at first — the profile picture is a tourist shot of the Eiffel Tower, and there are next-to-no posts which would suggest the profile belongs to a teenage girl. Wasn’t it socially acceptable for teenagers to party? To have boyfriends? To talk in text language?

But then, Irina had been wise beyond her years.

She’s almost given up when she finds it, a screenshot of a quote posted over a year ago. Villanelle translates it from Russian to mean:

“Language is information, and information is everything.”

She smiles, pleased.

She pays someone online to track the IP address, and no sooner has the results email come through than she’s throwing a duffel bag of her things into the car, starting it up for the long drive ahead of her. As she exits the town, the radio speaks of a young woman, found murdered in her apartment; Villanelle rolls the volume up, smiles briefly before switching to a different station, her thoughts turning to the task ahead.

He’ll be sorry, her mind growls at her, as she merges onto the AK-1 highway, en route to Whitehorse, Canada.

He’ll never betray her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come say hi on twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments and feedback are the fuel that keeps me going :)


	5. Sciamachy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve tries to adjust to her new life, but a visit from an old acquaintance forces her to make a decision about Villanelle, once and for all.

_sciamachy: [noun] – a battle against imaginary enemies_

Intelligence officers are trained to be keenly observant, to spot the signs that civilians miss. But it wouldn’t take an MI6 agent to realise that, even in death, Eve is continuing to piss off her employers.

‘After Villanelle’ is the title of the chapter in this, Eve’s new life, which is proving relatively similar to the old one in many aspects; she still gets up at 7:30am every morning, still skips breakfast and still goes to the supermarket once a week. She could almost pretend not to notice the side of her bed that persists to be vacant, the stark nakedness of her ring finger, the ticking of the living room clock that fills every waking second that she sits alone in the dark.

That first week had been busy; she’d spent long hours decorating, furnishing, arranging and then re-arranging, hopping between colour schemes until finally her little maisonette on Brixton Road felt cosy enough to sleep in. She doesn’t miss cohabiting – she’d enjoyed having free rein over her own house, had thrown herself into the tiny details, like the candles and the bath towels and the lampshades. It doesn’t matter that their primary purpose had been to distract her from the reality that now is her life.

Cabin fever had set in by day nine, and she’d finally taken a wander around the neighbourhood. It’s nowhere near as vibrant or lively as Ealing, but there is an unmistakable charm about the place which she takes comfort in. She has slipped into the local community as only she can given the circumstances – barely, and quietly. Afternoons had grown tedious by day ten, so she’d started attending a yoga class at 3pm every Tuesday and Thursday (a tactical decision made so as both to avoid mothers on the school-run and be finished before the nine-to-fivers show up).

The next few weeks had seen her establish a plain, painful routine of sleeping, eating and washing, wherein hours had started blurring together, and she’d needed to break the monotony before the days started blurring, too.

On day fourteen, she’d spent ten hours in the kitchen cooking from a Nigella Lawson cookbook.

On day fifteen, she’d caved and bought a packet of cigarettes, had burned through them by the end of the day and suddenly she had a new habit.

On day seventeen, she’d went in search of a change, had ended up in Gatsby Hair and Beauty and gotten them to frame her forehead with bangs.

On day twenty-one, she’d signed herself up to boxing classes at the gym.

By day twenty-five, she’d snapped, taken work at the first café that would hire her, not because her MI6 pay-off was starting to fall short, but rather before she crawled out of her skin with boredom.

It is day thirty-six now. She works a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, does yoga and boxing and cooking to pass the time, but the nights are always the same, always dark, always silent save for the tick, tick, ticking of the clock in the living room, where she often falls asleep in a mess of blankets and empty cans of G&T.

And now, of course, there is no Villanelle. It has been four weeks since the poem, and there’s been nothing since, and she’s okay with that. Because this is ‘After Villanelle’, and Eve has accepted that.

For the most part.

Eve hasn’t worked a customer service job since college, so stepping back into a waitressing role has been an adjustment. Urban Beans Coffee presents a very different challenge than MI6, and one not nearly as eclipsing. It’s on the corner of Munden Grove, five minutes from the church, Parkgate Junior high school, the doctor’s office and the gym. She’s only been here two weeks, and while it’s not rewarding in the slightest, it gives her purpose.

It’s just her bad luck, really, that this is her second consecutive late-coming.

Her boss, Dickhead Dave, isn’t unkind, per se – he had, after all, taken her on quite readily, no questions asked. When he rubs his gruff cheeks with his thick, dry fingers, he almost reminds her of Konstantin, though his accent is distinctively Liverpudlian, and his glare is more beady and condescending than it is secretive and warning.

He is, however, unhappy with her, suggests plainly that she try and be at least ten minutes early for every shift.

(MI6 would never. She almost misses it.)

“It won’t happen again,” Eve says, picking up her pad and pen from the counter, apron already tied around her waist.

“Be sure that it doesn’t,” Dickhead Dave says, through a huff he doesn’t bother to conceal as he hands over her name badge.

Eve’s jaw twitches, her grip on her pad and pen tightening. She wants nothing more in this moment than to backhand him – if she still had her wedding ring, she could’ve taken a considerable chunk out of his cheek. She imagines the scene in her head, imagines the shocked gasp of patrons as he collapses to the floor, whimpering in pain as blood runs hot and fast over the hand he would press to his stupid face.

But as it stands, her divorce is pending, and her finger is bare. Besides, while the job may suck, it is money that she’ll need eventually, and more than that, it gets her out of bed. So she clears her throat quietly and steels her chest hard enough to make her eyes water, careful to catch his attention at the exact moment she hiccups.

“I had a bad night,” she whimpers softly, fidgeting deliberately with her apron. “Nightmares, and no central heating, then I got my period–”

His disposition shifts almost immediately, comically, and he’s brushing her off with a weak smile and a wide hand before she can even thank him for his understanding.

As soon as she’s blinked the blurring from her eyes, she goes to find Erin, the Saturday girl that had been hired three years ago and now averages more than thirty hours a week. Erin is in her mid-twenties, so is full of that bright, infectious energy which makes her a hit with the public; she has a smile for everyone, goes out of her way to please and doesn’t slack. She is perhaps the antithesis of Villanelle, entrancing for the _right_ reasons.

Eve finds Anti-Villanelle by the condiments, balancing a stack of half-full plates in one palm and a mug of steaming hot liquid in the other. Her eyes deceive how stressed she is, but still, that smile.

“Any customers needing seen to right now?” Eve asks her.

“God, yes, the window table in the front please!” Her conversational laugh is high in pitch and childishly sweet, and that’s exactly why Eve can’t stand it. It reminds her of Villanelle, reminds her that only she could pull off such an obnoxious sound.

(She needs to stop comparing. She knows.)

Sandwich and tea for the woman in corporate attire who comes perfunctorily between three and five in the afternoon; strawberry shortcake for the frazzled looking teenager whose face creases up at the turning of every page in his calculus textbook; crescent moon cookies for the kids who come in from the high school at lunch time.

And then it’s strong black coffee for the three middle-aged women who sit by the window in the corner, exchanging wedding pictures and ultrasounds and praises promising a positively wonderful career in motherhood.

Eve has the same thoughts from the train, about Niko and how they’d never had kids, and she reminds herself it’s just as well. What the Hell would she have done in _that_ scenario? If Villanelle had come along and Eve had had children, would Eve have entertained it all the same way? Would Villanelle even have bothered pursuing her, if she’d been a mother?

As if on cue, her back, almost fully healed but not quite there yet, twinges a little, reminding her that this is ‘After Villanelle’, Eve, _after_.

It’s something she has become rather good at forgetting.

While wandering somewhat absent-mindedly around the shop floor, allowing the positive energy of others to sink into her skin, her thoughts turn to the poem she’d found in her bag more than a month ago. Poetry had never really been Villanelle’s style, she’d pondered, as she’d tried to fall asleep that first night in her new bed. Has she become more profound? Is this her way of reaching out? Of taunting her? Of apologising?

Eve had considered all of these options, had spent long hours thinking on them and what they would mean. She’d become fixated with the creases in her bedsheets, the dust on the bedside cabinet, had stared and wondered and gotten lost inside her own head until finally, she’d awoken on day five and resolved to get her shit together.

But her mind is always in hyperdrive, always alert, always churning thoughts that make her cold with paranoia and fear. She questions everything, analyses everyone. How can she be sure of who anyone really is?

Like this man, for example, just out of view through the window, heading for the entrance to this, her safe, quiet little place of work.

Before the bell sounds above the door as it opens, Eve’s body senses threat. Her forehead gets tight and her neck starts to sweat, leaving her uncomfortably hot and nauseous, the way you feel when you haven’t slept all night and decide to go running the next morning to wake yourself up. Energy slides from him, this tall man in a suit, slips off his shoulders and pools around his feet like a puddle, inching closer and closer into her personal space. Eve doesn’t realise that her heart is pounding or that her ears are ringing until he’s looking at her.

His eyes are jarring, for they are colourless. As present and as absent as air.

“Please,” he mumbles, his voice thick with the isles of Scotland. He removes his gloves slowly – carefully, the way killers do in movies, the way she imagines Villanelle would – and drops himself down into the lone seat of the table Eve had been wiping down. “Cream and sugar.”

None of what he’s saying makes any sense to her. “I’m sorry?”

Then, Suit Man looks at her again, studies her as if he can read her entire life story through her eyes, and repeats: “Cream and sugar, for the coffee. Please.”

Coffee with cream and sugar. Eve’s hands start to sweat and her heart hammers its way up into her throat. “Sure,” she says quietly, afraid her voice is going to crack. “Won’t be a minute.”

“Thank you, Eve,” Suit Man smiles, his eyes flashing.

Her discomfort only worsens when he uses her name, and she has to remind herself she’s wearing a name badge. She turns and heads back towards the counter, grabbing the coffee jug in her unsteady hands, sending the liquid sloshing up and down the sides. She keeps her eyes down, because she knows she’ll only stare if she were to look up.

As she pours she catches him folding his hands in his lap.

As she grabs the sugar packets she sees him unfold them to reach into a pocket.

As she reaches for the creamer she notices him looking at her, and she lowers her gaze again.

_Can’t breathe. No air. Gonna die._

_Gonna spill coffee everywhere._

“Hey, Erin?” Eve croaks, throat so dry the words stick in her windpipe. “Could you take this to table seventeen?”

Erin looks at her with a frown, face framed by ringlets of dark hair which have fallen loose from her bun. “You feeling okay?” She asks, eyebrow narrowed as she takes the mug from Eve’s hand.

“Yeah, yeah, I, uh—well, no, actually. I’m feeling kinda sick so I was gonna step out for a moment, get some air. If that’s alright?”

“Of course!” She exclaims, shaking her head. She motions to the back room with her hand. “Away! It’s nice and cool in back. Don’t come back out here until you feel a bit better, ‘kay?” 

“Thanks,” Eve breathes quietly, placing a hand over her stomach and not entirely faking it as she stumbles to the back room, where she can ride out her panic attack in peace.

_In, out, in, out, over and over._

_You’re okay._

_You’re safe._

_You’re okay._

But what if she’s _not_ okay? What if he’s with MI6, or the Twelve? What if the Twelve are here? What if they’ve finally come to kill her for what she did to Raymond?

_They’ll take you apart for this. Inch by inch._

That’s what he’d said. What if this is it? What if they’d been looking for her, ever since Rome, and they’d finally found her? What if they killed her right here, left her bleeding next to the coffee beans and the milk fridge?

What if they suffocated her with a bin liner?

What if they hanged her from the ceiling light, until her eyes were nothing but shells with the eggs scooped out?

She clutches her hair in her fists, closes her eyes and fights for control of her breath, grapples for it though it slips through her fingers like sand.

_In, out, in, out, over and over._

_Think, think, think. Be logical about this. Be smart._

_Eve Polastri is dead. You’re safe. They can’t find you here. They can’t find you anywhere. Eve Polastri is dead._

_You’re safe, you’re dead. You’re safe because you’re dead._

She’s never taken such comfort in her death before, but it works; after a while, her heartbeat slows, her breathing slows, and she can finally see her way clear enough to rejoin reality.

Because of course, there’s no way Suit Man is part of the Twelve, or MI6, or any other organisation which may have reason to look for her. As far as the world knows, she doesn’t even exist.

She’s safe, here, in her quiet little place of work, and in her cute little maisonette on Brixton Road.

But to be overly cautious — because Bill had always taught her to be unscrupulous about these kinds of things — she observes table seventeen with silent contemplation. Suit Man holds his coffee in one hand, thumb caressing the rim of the mug. He looks at the clock once every three minutes, and doesn’t leave for another thirty-seven minutes.

With each moment, the warning signs he’d first presented with are all but extinguished.

Eve thinks of other things, thinks of customers, bedsheets, Villanelle, coffee, cream, sugar.

Suit Man is looking again as he stands to leave, and she rationalises until she’s blue in the face that she’s finally, completely cracked.

There are kids playing outside in the street, kicking around a football, chattering raucously at one another. It’s 8pm that same Wednesday evening – Eve would have thought that their parents would’ve had them home by now, what with it being a school night. They’re extremely _loud_.

Eve ignores them, leaning against the stove to focus on stirring her soup. It’s beginning to smell aromatic now – a heady mix of lamb, mushroom and garlic – and she inhales it deeply, allowing it to fill her with the nostalgia of a life she’d left behind.

It’s not so much a nostalgia for her marriage, she realises, but more for London, and all of its eccentricities. Living on the outskirts, she still gets to experience the cool, dreary weather, the British-isms and the perfect cup of English Breakfast tea, but she misses the rife buzz of the Underground, the lights of the West End, the constant tangle of the public in Leicester Square. On the outside like this, looking in, she feels like an imposter in her own city, a pretender, though she accepts, or concedes, that she’ll never be quite as good a pretender as Villanelle.

She’s pulled from her thoughts by the ringing of the doorbell. The sound is tinny and grating, demands that Eve leave her soup, but Eve has frozen, wooden spoon in hand.

Who the fuck could that possibly be? What could anyone possibly want from her at this time of night? She’s _dead_.

It rings again, filling the whole house with its shrillness. Swallowing hard, she forces her legs towards the front door. She has since swapped the wooden spoon for a kitchen knife, which she wields low and ready by her side as she presses her eye to the peephole, her heart pounding in her chest.

A man stands on her porch; he’s slender, if slightly stooped, wears a large satchel bag slung over his shoulder and is frowning, glancing at the sky like he’s afraid he may be caught in the rain.

Eve blinks, narrowing her eyebrows – she recognises him, she’s sure, has seen that black mess of a beard and that nervous gait before. It’s only when she hears his accent – broadly Cheltenham – that it clicks within her.

It only confuses her more – why would Dr Martin the Psychopath Expert be here to see her?

“You’ve had a haircut,” he notices with a smile, in lieu of greeting as soon as she opens the door.

“I–yeah,” she frowns, touching her fingers to the ends of her bangs subconsciously with her free hand, guiltily hiding the knife behind her back with the other. “Hi, Martin.”

“Evening, Eve,” he grins, chuckling a little at his own joke. He casts his finger sweepingly about the front of the house. “This is a nice little place!”

She blinks. “Yeah, it’s–it’s nice.”

And then she waits a beat, expecting him to explain the reason he’s here, but it seems he is also waiting, smiling like he has all the patience in the world.

She bites back a sigh, bites nonetheless. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh yes!” He says. “Carolyn asked me to visit. Apparently she needs an informal evaluation on how you’re doing, something about needing to cross her Ts and dot her Is with the higher ups at MI6. Fairly standard procedure though, nothing to worry about!”

Eve can read between the lines of what he’s saying, knows all they want is a piece of paper to assure them that, even though Eve may be dead to the world, she doesn’t actually want to die.

She sighs.“It’s after 8pm.”

“Yes, I apologise for the lateness of the hour – you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had navigating the tube here. Got off at the wrong stop twice.” He looks expectantly over her shoulder then, to the warm orange glow that lights up the hallway and the kitchen. “You mind if I…?”

“Oh,” she says, catching on and opening the door wider. “Yeah, come in.”

He has a knack for making himself at home, it would seem – he heads straight for the kitchen and sits himself down at the breakfast bar, sighing contentedly as he lays his satchel down on the countertop. “Something smells nice!” he says, as he removes his jacket. “What are you cooking?”

“Soup,” she replies, heading back over to the oven. She slips the knife back into the drawer. “Have you eaten, would you–?”

“Oh, none for me, thanks. You should turn the heat down though, it’ll burn.”

“Right.” She’s already bringing the pot to a gentle simmer. It should be ready in the next ten minutes. “Can I get you a drink?”

He asks for water, so she fills a glass with ice and runs it under the tap, sliding it to him across the countertop as she reaches for her half-empty bottle of gin. “You mind if I partake?”

He brushes her off, takes a long sip of his water to disguise the fact that he’s watching the measure she pours herself.

She knows he’s doing it, though – for a shrink, his pokerface is lacking. But exhaustion clings to her bones, so she doesn’t much care. 

“So how have you been, Eve?” He asks, once she’s taken the seat next to him, once he’s organised himself with his notepad and pen.

“Fine,” she shrugs. “Keeping myself busy.”

“What’s a typical day like for you?”

“I go to my job. I do yoga, and boxing.”

“What do you do for fun?”

Eve thinks, almost asks him to define ‘fun’ but decides against it. “I learned how to cook. And I visited the National Gallery last week on my day off.”

“Oh, it’s lovely there.”

“It is.”

“What did you like about it?”

“It was quiet,” she muses, “and beautiful.”

She catches him looking at her then before he writes something down, and she swallows a little, wonders if that perhaps had been the wrong thing to say.

“Any particular exhibits you enjoyed most?” He enquires.

“The John Stezaker exhibit.” She closes her eyes, remembers sitting in the middle of room, alone, remembers how bright it had been. “It was all these flashing images, going so fast you couldn’t even make any of them out.”

“Did you like that because you feel you can relate?”

She frowns, opens her eyes to look at him again. “I don’t understand.”

He elaborates. “Do you feel in control? Do you feel life is passing you by?”

“I–don’t know.”

“How about in Rome, when you were injured – did you think about your life?”

 _You’re ruining the moment. This is what you wanted. I thought you were special._ “I’m not sure,” she says quietly, willing Villanelle’s voice out of her mind. “It’s kind of blurred.”

“Okay,” he nods, murmuring quietly to himself for a few seconds as he jots down a few more notes. “Do you miss home?”

“It’s–complicated. There are things I miss.”

“And what about Villanelle?”

Her jaw twitches. “What about her?”

“Have you had any contact with her since Rome?”

“No.”

“So, do you miss her?”

“I’m angry with her.”

“Because she shot you.”

“ _Yes_.”

“Are you angry because she shot you? Or because she left you?”

“I…” and then she’s stopping, words lost on her. Has she really never considered it? The idea is frightening. So, she seeks to deflect. “Does it matter? Anger is anger.”

He ought to sense her deflection – she’s certain he does – but he doesn’t press, rather asks a different question. “What do you do with this anger?”

“I box. I drink. I smoke. I sleep, a lot.”

“Would you say you drink more now than you did previously?”

“Yes.”

“And the smoking, is that–”

“New.”

He asks again, softer this time: “do you miss her?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers, tears filling her eyes suddenly, faster than she can think to blink them away. “There’s a part of me that aches, all the time. But I lost everything – my husband, my friends, my home, my job. And yeah, she’s…she’s gone, too. I don’t know who or what it is that I’m missing.”

Somewhere in her mind, the answer rears, creaking in the void. Eve blinks, loosens the thought with a shake of her head. She's not nearly drunk enough.

He is silent listening to her, and remains silent for a long moment after she’s finished speaking. He looks down at his pad, half-scrawled over, but writes nothing new. There is conflict in his eyes, stormy and frustrated; he is torn, she realises, but over what? She supposes he must have something to say, a question in mind that he is perhaps not professionally permitted to ask. Her skin is itchy with impatience and she longs to know what it is that has suddenly given him pause.

Eventually he looks back at her, the calm of his decisiveness evident on his face, and she concludes, before he speaks, that it is not a question he has for her, but rather a confession.

“Some weeks ago, I conducted an indirect assessment,” he admits, softly, as though the walls are eavesdropping, “on Oksana Astankova.”

Something creaks inside her then; a door she’s been battling with her back suddenly roars to life against her shoulders, as if suddenly caught by wind at the mere mention of the woman’s given name. “Why?” she half-demands in a rushed breath, unaware she’d been holding the air inside her lungs.

He sighs a little then, drops his pen onto the countertop. Eve sees it for what it is – defeat. A silent concession to his own decision to talk.

“Because,” he begins, “she is interesting. By far one of the most complex, disastrous cases I’ve ever come across, and believe you me, I’ve been doing this job a long time. I have come across some horrendous people in my time, people I wouldn’t ever want to even think about again. The fact of the matter is, for all that these people were awful and without morals, they all seemed, to me, very…” and he searches for the word with his hands, his forehead creasing with the effort.

The word is on Eve’s tongue, unwavering and without hesitation. “Boring,” she supplies, quietly but confidently.

He hums. “Mm, maybe. But with Villanelle…Oksana…I suppose you could say I understand why she’d consume you the way she did.”

“She didn’t _consume_ me,” Eve protests, somewhat weakly. “I had a job to do.”

“Of course,” he nods. “I, too, was interested, work-wise. I poured over her file, her loose notes, everything you’d ever said about her. It kept me up at night, trying to figure her out.”

Part of Eve is relieved that someone else shares in her perpetual turmoil. The other, more dominant part of her, feels somewhat compelled to attack, to put Villanelle behind iron gates and shield her from the microscopes that everyone is desperate to pin her under.

She alone holds the microscope. _She_ does. “What are you saying, I don’t–”

“This is my professional opinion,” he says, clasping his hands together and fixing Eve with a serious look. “Oksana Astankova is red, in a world of black and white. She has psychopathical tendencies, absolutely, and she scores highly on the psychopathy scale but in terms of being a psychopath...she’s too emotional. Too invested, too…”

“Too what?” Eve prompts impatiently, her heart pounding.

He looks at her then. “Too desperate to be normal. She seeks attention, yes, but it’s contact she wants. She’s seeking out connections with people, and holding onto the ones that mean something to her.”

She swallows hard, trying to process what she’s being told, trying to figure out why she needs to know this, why it’s relevant. “Do you…do you think she’s capable of love?”

“Feeling it? Yes.”

“What about understanding it?” Because surely not. There is no way. There can’t be.

“I mean, do any of us really understand love? Maybe it’s not something to be understood but simply to be felt and experienced.”

Eve sighs sharply, fights off the warble in her voice. “Bullshit. Is it real? If it’s true, if she did feel love, if she...if she _loved_ someone...would it be real?”

And maybe she’s given away too much, for his face has gone soft with an understanding that leaves her feeling naked. “The very fact that Oksana has all of these desires and emotions means that yes, for her love would be very real.” He smiles softly, almost sympathetically. “Probably very intense, very passionate...probably very likely to implode and destroy everything. As love tends to do.”

He looks away then, towards the oven. “Oh, your soup is bubbling.”

On shaky legs, she shuffles over, turns down the heat completely, swallowing so hard her throat hurts. Her mind is racing, burning, because for all that nothing makes sense anymore, the awful gnawing in her gut is telling her that she’s been wrong about everything this whole time. “So…in Rome...when I said I wouldn’t go…”

And, of course, he knows exactly what she’s talking about. Neither of them are under any illusions that Carolyn Martens would keep her secrets.

“It probably would’ve broken her heart.”

It’s the First Sign.

The Second Sign comes the next day. She spends all day at work in a trance, serves coffee and sandwiches and strawberry shortcake like they’re nothing more than motions to go through, and when she gets home that evening, she finds a package on her doorstep. Her nerves are jangled by it, and they don’t seem to lessen any when she learns it’s been sent by Niko.

It contains a snowglobe, the Alaska snowglobe that they’d purchased from Fortnum and Mason six years ago because it had, in her own words, “been super cute”. The note is tucked inside the bubble wrap, one line scrawled in Niko’s perfect St-Theobald-taught hand:

“Your girlfriend forgot this after she killed my friend – figured you’d want it” _._

_I was thinking we should go to Alaska._

Suddenly some things finally make sense.

Eve has never believed in coincidence, but suddenly, she is seeing Villanelle everywhere – in blonde strangers from behind, in beautiful, youthful women who laugh and smile at her on the street. She hears her voice in the yoga studio, in the gym, and in the quiet cloud of cigarette smoke that fills her living room each night. She almost thinks she can smell her, sometimes, that rich perfume of French lavender and blackcurrant that seems still to cling to the hairs of her neck, so many months on from that, their first real meeting.

It becomes torturous, mocking, until finally, two days after Dr Martin’s visit, the Third Sign comes, blinking bold and new at the top of her email inbox like it had always been destined to end up there.

It’s pictures of Anchorage, Alaska, with only one subject line –

_“It’s beautiful here, baby. Come find me x”_

Eve doesn’t believe in coincidence, doesn’t quite believe in God either, but she’s damn sure that Bill is laughing at her somewhere, encouraging her into dangerous territory. Red, in a world of black and white, that’s how Dr Martin had described Villanelle. What colour did that make Eve? How many colours could she turn before she becomes completely unrecognisable?

For the first time, she allows herself to consider, what would his advice have been? What would he have done in her shoes?

 _Buck up,_ she imagines him pointing at her with a cheeky smile _, and give it everything you’ve got._

 _You’ve followed her for this long,_ he would’ve said _. You need to see it through to the end._

_Not for MI6, or anyone else. But for yourself._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come say hi on twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments and feedback are my lifeblood :)


	6. Selcouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Villanelle seeks her vengeance, but ends up with something else entirely.  
> (This one's a personal favourite of mine. Things are about to heat up!)

_selcouth: [adjective] – unfamiliar, rare, strange, and yet marvellous_

Yelena Vasiliev’s favourite herb is basil. It’s in everything she cooks. She crushes leaves of it into her husband’s smoothies every morning, tells him it’s to ensure he’s getting his vitamins A, C and K; she makes essential oils for her daughter, to treat her cuts and wounds for when she inevitably falls off the trampoline because she does so insist on playing too close to the edge. They both think she is crazy, no doubt, but she acts in their best interests, whether they see that or not.

There is a mini-market just fifteen minutes from the house by car, and she travels there every Monday morning with her largest grocery cooling bag. Yelena fills it with cabbages, tomatoes, apples, and, of course, the freshest basil leaves, plucked that same day by the vendor. She is normally back by 8am, giving her plenty of time to prepare breakfast for her family before they can get on with yet another day in restrictive witness protection.

Today begins like any other. Yelena pulls into the driveway at 08:04, lugs her bag of nutritious goodness over the threshold to their MI6-provided safehouse; it’s reminiscent of their home in Moscow, has a beauteous backyard that looks onto a lake that stretches for miles, racing towards the sun where it rises. All in all, it could be worse.

This morning, she has brought pink grapefruits. They will pair wonderfully with the basil leaves.

“Irina,” she calls out, slamming the door closed with her foot and dropping the bag to the floor with a grunt. She begins divesting herself of her coat and scarf, sighing loudly. “ _Irina_. Pupsik, idi i pomogi mne.”

From the living room, her daughter calls back: “Mama, tupaya psikhopatka suka ona vernulas’.”

“ _You little shit_ ,” Yelena hears hissed in angry English. She frowns, concerned. The voice is female, but certainly older than her daughter’s, harsh and threatening. Had Irina made a friend?

But then, what kind of friend would one refer to as a “dumb, psycho bitch?”

Yelena steps into the living room and promptly shrieks, her coat and scarf hitting the floor.

There, on the couch, is the woman from almost a year ago, the woman who had locked her in a cupboard and snatched Irina from her arms. She is dressed all in black, is cross-legged and pointing a gun at the back of her daughter’s head as she assembles a jigsaw puzzle on the floor.

“Good morning, Mrs Vasiliev,” Villanelle grins jovially, pushing the barrel of the gun further into the mess of Irina’s short hair. “How wonderful to see you again.”

“Mother, go make breakfast. I’m starving.”

“Shut it, pipsqueak,” Villanelle snaps, digging the toe of her boot into the space between Irina’s shoulder blades. “No-one is making anything.”

Yelena sighs sharply, leans back on the couch opposite their unwelcome guest. “Really, Irina, do hush.” She looks at Villanelle then, swallows down the fear in her throat until it’s manageable. “What do you want from us?”

“I want your stupid, arsehole husband,” Villanelle says, with such callous simplicity it’s truly chilling. “You both are unfortunately collateral damage. You can blame him for that.”’

“I’m missing a corner piece,” Irina sighs dramatically, shaking her head at her half-finished jigsaw before turning to look at Villanelle over her shoulder. “You may as well shoot me.”

“ _Irina_!”

Villanelle just snorts, peers down at the jigsaw on the floor with a raised eyebrow. Her gun, a sleek Glock 21, hangs loose between her fist as her arm dangles over the armrest of the couch, but is still aimed, however lazily, in the young girl’s direction. “What is the picture supposed to be?”

“The Golden Gate bridge,” Irina grumbles. And then, under her breath: “Although if you have to _ask_.”

“Just find your stupid corner piece,” Villanelle mutters lowly, ignoring the sudden warmth in her cheeks (sue her, she’s never been toSan Francisco). She looks at Yelena then, observes the way the woman’s hands seemed to have stopped shaking. She frowns, feels the need to flick the gun back in her direction.

Sure enough, the tremors return. Villanelle smirks, and asks: “When do you expect your husband will be home?”

“I-I don’t know. It could be hours. He has business.”

“In _Canada_?” Villanelle deadpans, humming in disbelief. Her eyes turn dark then, warning. “Do not lie to me. I don’t take well to being lied to.”

Irina snorts. “Hypocrite.”

Villanelle’s head snaps around, and she glares at her. “Fuck off.”

“ _You_ fuck off.”

“I’ll blow your head to pieces!”

“I’ll blow _your_ head to pieces!”

“ _Girls_ ,” comes a voice from across the room, frustratingly familiar. The bickering promptly stops, and three pairs of eyes follow the voice to the doorway that separates the kitchen and the living room.

Konstantin stands there, filling the frame like a big, white Russian bear. “Really, Villanelle?” He sighs. “You need to grow up.”

“ _Wowww,_ ” Villanelle drawls, her eyes growing maniacally wide. _“_ I have missed you too, Konstantin!”

“We need to talk.”

“Oh, we _do_ , do we.”

“Let’s go somewhere quiet,” he implores her. “Alone.”

Her jaw drops in feigned shock. “Are you _finally_ propositioning me for sex? Your wife is _right there_!”

She makes a point of thrusting the gun in Yelena’s direction then – it’s satisfying to watch the way his jaw twitches.

“Let’s just go, shall we?”

“Fine,” she shrugs with a cool smile. “It doesn’t really matter _where_ you die. By the water would be lovely, no?”

From the floor, Irina huffs loudly in Villanelle’s direction. “You are so dramatic.”

Villanelle groans low in her throat then, eyes fluttering in frustration. “Maybe I’ll kill her first,” she growls at Konstantin, flicking the gun in his daughter’s direction for the millionth time. “She is more annoying now than last time.”

Konstantin shrugs. “She is getting older.”

“She is shit at jigsaws.”

“Hey!”

Konstantin sighs again – weary, no doubt – and turns his body half-away, intent on leaving the room. He fixes Villanelle with an expectant look and gestures behind him, to the patio doors on the other side of the kitchen, a side exit to the garden.

“Come,” he says. “We’re interrupting breakfast.”

The Vasilievs’ backyard is a miniature woodland of holly trees and native shrubs; dandelions grow between the honey bricks of the path which slopes down from the patio doors, weaving through the rose beds to a large slabbed area among the grass. There sits a cocoon swing seat, big enough for two and mouse-brown in colour, with three chocolate cotton canvas cushions. It faces outward, onto the lake, which ripples in rich cyans under the soft morning sunlight.

The unhurried rush of the wind brings everything to life around them; moves through the thick tussocks of green under their shoes, moves through the roses, sets the swing gently rocking as the water too chases itself in and out.

But Villanelle is still, plants her feet at the end of the honey brick path and watches Konstantin continue further to the lake. Her gun is steady in her hand, weighs nothing.

She could shoot him now, once in the back, and he’d stumble forward, crash down into the water. He’d drown before he bled out – she wouldn’t mind.

But no, she decides, her mouth souring with the memory of Eve stumbling forward, crashing down.

She wants to see his eyes.

She wants him to see hers.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she says.

“No,” he agrees, still walking. When he looks at her over his shoulder, she can see he’s almost smiling. “There is an Audi Q3 Sportback two streets away. Only _you_ would drive something that flashy and park it that terribly.”

She balks, nostrils flaring. “My parking is flawless, thank you very much.”

He shrugs; she feels her fingers itch around the gun.

He has stopped walking now, has his hands deep in his coat pockets and his back to the lake, is looking straight at her. “You look terrible,” he observes, with something that she recognises as sympathy.

It appears insincere. She snorts, offended.

“Since when do you have a death wish?”

“I am worried about you.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” he sighs, exasperated, one hand coming up to scratch at his balding head. “I know you are angry but I am still your friend. I care about you.”

“Screw you,” she laughs humourlessly, her grip on the gun growing tighter. “ _No-one_ cares about me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You were my friend,” and suddenly the gun is outstretched, six feet from the curve of his belly. “I _trusted_ you.”

“I know,” he murmurs, frowning deeply. “I am sorry.”

“No. You’re not. Because you have your _family_ ,” and she _sneers_ that word, forces it out between her teeth as if it might stain her tongue if she tastes it for too long.

His forehead creases then, his whole face growing solemn in a way she doesn’t think she’s ever seen. “I never wanted you to get hurt.”

She scoffs, because _seriously?_ “It’s a little late for that.”

“I would have brought you with me. I couldn’t.”

“Oh _bullshit_.”

“I wanted to save you,” he insists, his voice rising, firm and determined. “To give you a chance.”

“It’s too fucking late,” she snaps, her hair catching in the wind. “How can I believe anything you say now, when I know you’ll do anything to save yourself and your pathetic family?”

“They are not pathetic,” he insists with a huff. “You are upset, you’re not thinking clearly.”

“Everything is _gone,_ ” and suddenly the wind has caught her voice, knocking it off kilter. “I have _nothing_ left. So yes, Konstantin, I am fairly fucking upset.”

“Don’t be such a child.”

“Rather brave of you to keep antagonising the woman holding the _gun_.”

“So shoot me.”

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I need you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“That this is _your_ fault!” She exclaims, eyes wide, half-desperate for him to see what he’s done, half-furious that he could be so ignorant. “ _You_ did this. You _broke_ my heart, you and her.”

His face darkens then, a tone darker than her own crimson. “Villanelle, listen to me.”

“You need to understand that.”

“You need to stop. You need to _listen_.”

“I need you to shut up.”

“Eve is still alive.”

Suddenly the gun is firing, ripping through the air and into the water with a crash, making Konstantin jump.

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Villanelle snarls. Her eyes are burning suddenly, rage filling her belly. Their exchange had been somewhat lacking until this point, rife with the dullness of her exhaustion, but now everything inside her beats violently with anger, and all thoughts of sleep are suddenly replaced with an unyielding desperation to destroy the world around her.

“She is,” he nods, his voice wobbling a little and seriously _how fucking dare he_.

“No, seriously, _fuck you, Konstantin_. She’s dead, I shot her.” And then her own voice is breaking, dissolving into a whisper as images and thoughts of Eve prick painfully again to the surface of her brain. “I killed her.”

“With _that_ gun? Are you serious?”

Suddenly she is snapping, bursting apart with her fury. She launches towards him with a roar, ready to tear him to pieces, ready to end him once and for all. The gun connects with his face; he staggers to the side with a cry, blood dripping from his fingers where they clutch his cheek, and she raises her knee, smashes it against his stomach and jerks her elbow down on his back when he keels over. He spits her name through blood, tries to be heard, but her own blood is boiling in her head and in her ears, deafening her to his cries and the wind, everything but the sickening crunch of his nose when she strikes it, hurling him to his back in the grass.

She pants hard as she stands over him, aiming the gun straight for his heart with both hands, but suddenly she is crashing down on top of him with a yelp, as he yanks her left leg out from under her.

“Asshole!” She cries, snarling in frustration as he manages to wrestle the gun out of her hands and toss it off into the roses nearby.

“Listen to me!”

He yells, but she’s already lunging off to the side with a groan, thrusting her arm into the roses and feeling frantically for her weapon. She quickly snags it between her fingers, has just about gotten her grip of it again when suddenly his arms are around her shoulders, strong and threatening. She struggles against him, growls and kicks her feet, but he manages to roll them, pins her under his body by the lake.

“Let me go!” She howls fiercely, squirming and fighting to keep ahold of the gun as he tries to pry it from her. “ _Otpusti menya_! _Otpusti menya_!”

“Look at me!” He demands, angry and bleeding and bleary-eyed, his face mere centimetres from her own. “I’m telling the truth!”

She screams with her whole body then, swears in livid Russian, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she is working to read him, to find the truth, to separate reality from the bullshit. His words come garbled but insistent through his pink teeth, all vibrations in the air, inconsequential to the medium through which they travel but landing with a _thunk_ inside Villanelle’s chest all the same; forcing her lungs to clash against her ribcage with the gravity of what the truth of them could mean.

_Eve is alive._

_Eve is alive._

_You didn’t kill her._

_You didn’t kill her, she’s alive._

Villanelle can feel her body slowing, can feel her breath growing shallow, teetering dangerously on the edge of something she can’t understand. She looks at him, his face smeared with blood and tears, and she realises that her whole body is thrumming now with something new, something beside from rage.

When he reaches for her gun, she cedes it, her eyes going wide as the wave inside her rushes higher, heavier, faster, until finally she is dissolving into heaving sobs, her body crumbling completely to the grass under her back.

After that, Villanelle’s thirteen-hour drive finally catches up with her. Konstantin brings her back to the house, gets washcloths for both their faces before showing her to the spare bedroom upstairs. “Rest,” he tells her, handing her the washcloth. “The sheets are fresh.”

No sooner has he left and her face is clean than she is collapsing onto the bed, falling into a fitful sleep almost immediately. When she wakes, it’s dark outside, and the house smells of basil and rich tomatoes.

She lies there for several minutes, is staring at a paint blemish on the ceiling when Irina knocks on the door.

“Máma says to tell you that dinner is ready,” she says.

Villanelle blinks, caught off-guard. “What?”

“Dinner?” Irina squints. “You know what _dinner_ is, right?”

As if on cue, Villanelle's stomach growls at her. “I know what dinner is,” she grumbles, shifting awkwardly.

“Come on then,” Irina says, rolling her eyes as she heads back in the direction of the stairs. “It’s rude to keep people waiting.”

Villanelle frowns then, has to swallow hard against the odd mix of emotions that suddenly threatens to overwhelm her. She is sweaty and lightheaded but more-than hungry, and she supposes it _would_ be rude of her to decline, if there is already a plate for her (however foreign such a concept might be – Aaron Peel might have paid for countless meals she’d enjoyed, but Eve had been the last person to prepare and serve dinner to her).

The dining table is long with eight chairs, and the four of them occupy the top half; Konstantin at the head of the table with his wife and daughter on one side, while Villanelle sits on the other. They eat in a relative silence which is only slightly uncomfortable – occasionally Irina will make a throwaway comment about a book she’s re-reading or something she’s seen online, and only once does she ask Villanelle why she wanted to kill her father.

“ _Dovol’no_ ,” Konstantin insists, effectively putting a stop to any and all questions Irina may have been thinking of asking. He takes painkillers with _stoli_ on the rocks, a potent medicinal mix that has him hissing in through his teeth. He looks like shit – his eye and cheek are discoloured and swollen, and his nose, treated with bandage and tape, is undoubtedly at least twice the size it should be.

Villanelle thinks she almost feels guilty, but swallows it down with a forkful of tagliatelle, alongside everything else she’s feeling. She’s still unsure of what exactly is happening right now – how had it come to be that almost killing Konstantin in his own backyard had lead to family dinner?

It’s as she’s pondering this that she notices, through the living room window, a vehicle parked on the driveway that hadn’t been there before.

“Is that my car?”

“Yes, dear,” Yelena says, with a smile which is neither unkind nor too friendly. “We moved it for you.”

Villanelle feels her eyes water then, inexplicably, and she may not understand much but she knows that that means something. She thinks it’s maybe permission, or acceptance, and she can’t comprehend nor fight the smile that tugs at her mouth. “Thank you,” she murmurs softly. “And thank you for the pasta. It’s delicious.”

Yelena’s smile changes then, turns real in Villanelle’s eyes, and when she looks to Konstantin, he is nodding amiably in her direction, letting her know that he has forgiven her for the current state of his face.

Her chest aches in this moment, like maybe her feelings for him had only ever been distorted, rather than decimated entirely; a close mimic of hatred rather than the genuine article. She’d never been very good at telling the difference, but for right now, she’s almost entirely sure, and that’s enough to put her at ease.

Afterwards, Irina is at the kitchen sink washing up – Villanelle offers to dry, to be polite. There are approximately forty seconds where the only sound between them is that of the water sloshing over the pots and plates, before Irina is turning to her with the most curious expression.

“Are you still sad?” She asks.

Villanelle narrows her eyebrows, runs her towel clockwise over a plate. “I told you, I am not sad. I have a happy face.”

“Your face is not happy. It is very red.”

“You are very rude.”

Irina just shrugs, dumping two handfuls of cutlery into the sud-filled basin. “I am a teenager – it is socially acceptable.”

Villanelle hums thoughtfully – she had heard that.

“Tell the truth,” Irina insists.

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know how to.”

“Try. It’s easy.”

Villanelle scoffs in spite of herself. “No, it’s not.”

“Yes it is. Are you sad, yes or no?”

“That is not an easy question.”

“Yes or no?!”

“Irina-”

“Yesornoyesornoyesorno-”

“ _Yes,_ ” Villanelle exclaims loudly, eyes wide with frustration as she dries the last pot. “Dios _mío,_ you are so annoying.”

Irina cocks her head to the side then, sighs. “I’m sorry that you are sad,” she offers gently, taking the pot from her and walking past her to put it away.

Villanelle is quiet as she places the cutlery back in their correct places in the drawer. She supposes there are right words to say in response, supposes that any normal person would perhaps say ‘thank you’.

She can’t bring herself to.

“Do you think that you’ll stop being sad soon?”

Villanelle’s mind turns back to Eve in this moment, and she breathes out softly, drying her hands off with the towel before folding it up.

“Who knows, kid.”

 _She’s going to be so mad at me_ , she thinks, but in the haze of her mind a darker, more sinister thought stands out, seeking to suggest that perhaps there is no anger of any kind. Perhaps instead, after everything, Eve has finally called time of death on their relationship, folded Villanelle away into the back of her mind like a dishcloth, and forgotten about her entirely.

Before she knows it, two weeks have passed. The air has gotten colder and the leaves have become a tapestry of Autumn, detaching from their branches to lie crunchy underfoot in piles of vivid reds and golden hues. Villanelle has been raking them, clearing off the path and Irina’s trampoline to build an earthen orange mound at the side of the house. She figures once the winter comes, she’ll switch to shovelling snow off the driveway instead.

She has proven herself quite the help around the house. After that first night, she’d realised she was without a plan for the first time in forever, and while that unsettled her greatly, she’s grown enough over the last year to be able to appreciate a moment of silence. So, she’d joined them for meals for the rest of the week; by Thursday, she’d migrated from dishwasher to table-layer, and by Sunday Yelena had her chopping up tomatoes and cucumber for the salad bowl.

It’s only slightly boring, but she finds it doesn’t bother her quite as much as it used to; she vacuums the hallway, puts the groceries away, and while they are monotonous and menial tasks, her skin doesn’t itch while she does them. It’s a quiet sort of domesticity, the kind that she’d only ever envisioned having with Eve.

But she’s okay, and this is okay. Because for the first time in a long time, she isn’t alone.

She spends a lot of time with Irina; they argue for the most part, snap and jibe at one another until they’re red in the face, but it’s almost kind of lovely. Villanelle looks forward to their morning jigsaws, their piano lessons, even if the puzzles and the pieces go unfinished most of the time. Irina teaches her Mandarin, too, and she helps Irina with her Serbian; they spend hours inside different languages, only switching back when they’re called for meals and Yelena insists they speak Russian or English at the dinner table.

Villanelle doesn’t mind Russian so much anymore, either. Yelena diffuses the awful weight it has carried for years.

One week after her arrival, Konstantin had called her outside to the driveway, where a gorgeous blue Ducati motorcycle was parked next to her Audi. “It needs some work,” he’d offered, toeing the bike’s back tyre with his boot. “If you want.”

Villanelle had shrugged in agreement – two days later, Konstantin had found her working furiously on it, surrounded by tools and cloths, her cheeks dirty from where she’d touched her fingers to them. They’d talked for a bit while she worked, mostly about trivial things like television and the news, neither of them willing to bring up anything more difficult.

But that had been okay, and even now, two weeks on from that first night, Konstantin doesn’t mind that they’ve yet to properly talk about everything that has happened. He looks out the window and sees Irina on the trampoline, throwing a football at Villanelle who sits cross-legged in the grass ten feet away, a soft smile on her face and in her eyes.

He smiles, relieved. Everything is okay.

That same night he finds her outside in the swing seat, curled up in a blanket, staring out at the lake. She looks comfortable, so he doesn’t ask her to make room for him, simply sits beside her on the soft ground, follows her gaze to the water.

It is quiet, save for the grasshoppers and the breeze, but he can sense she is deep in thought. She’d always radiated a silent energy when she’d been planning, and she has been quieter for the last few days, her expressions controlled and careful, like she may explode if she’s set off.

He waits, expectant, and after a few long moments, she speaks.

“Was it your idea?” She asks, her eyes flickering to him briefly.

He doesn’t look back. “Was what my idea?”

“To lie about Eve.”

He sighs, turns to face her so that she can see his eyes when he explains. “No. But it was for her own safety. You think the Twelve would let her live after what happened in Rome?”

Villanelle seems to ponder this for a second.

Konstantin continues. “Not everything is done to hurt you,” he says. “It is actually usually the opposite.”

“You sold me out.”

“Yet here I am,” he holds his hands up with a smile, “looking after your ass again. One day I will stop, y’know”

“Good,” Villanelle scoffs, but it’s half-hearted. She can feel the wall of salt between them fissuring away, and at his knowing look, she can’t help but roll her eyes, covering the blush in her cheeks by looking back off into the darkness that shrouds the lake.

He is still looking up at her. “What do you want?” he asks. “Really.”

And there it is. She’s been thinking about this for four days now, in bed at night, in quiet moments making soup with Yelena, playing catch with the pipsqueak in the garden. The whole thing has been an interesting test of her own self-limitation, and she’s almost sure she’d be lying if she were to say that she hasn’t been enjoying the mundanity of the Vasiliev family routine. It’s been like a vacation, of sorts, albeit a different type to the sort she’s used to. But it’s become apparent to her over the last few days that her resolve to settle has grown shaky. She’s grown itchy. Claustrophobic. Bored.

It is clear to her now, what she wants, what she needs to move on, to finally close the door on that part of her life.

To let all of it, including Eve, go.

“Do you remember Moscow?” she asks. “The first time I tried to kill you?”

“Ah, yes, vividly.”

“You hit me with a log.”

“You _were_ trying to kill me.”

She grumbles. “Let it go.”

He lets it go. “What about it, anyway?”

“You told me you didn’t know the names of the Twelve. That you weren’t a Keeper.”

“That is still true.”

“Do you know the Keepers?”

He blinks, looks down, and for a second she thinks he is going to lie to her again. But, after a beat, he replies. “One, maybe. A diplomat for the Dutch government. I am not sure, though.”

“I want his name.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to hit them where it hurts,” she says, her face growing serious, chilled in the moonlight. “I am going to kill him, and every other one just like him.”

He furrows his brow, concerned. “You would be tying a noose around your own neck.”

“Good thing I’m a professional then, ah?” She smirks. “I do the tying.”

“I mean it,” he says sternly, levelling her with a pointed finger. “You can’t do this alone.”

“So you will help me?” She infers.

“Help you commit suicide?”

“Help me get _rid_ of them,” she declares empathetically, leaning forward in the swing seat. “I know you want that, too! And…” she shrugs then, pursing her lips. “I’m sure Carolyn wouldn’t be opposed.”

“You want to work with Carolyn again?”

“I’ll do whatever I have to.”

“And Eve?”

Her cheek almost twitches, but she schools it. “What about her? She isn’t MI6 anymore, why would she be there?”

“So…you are okay?”

“Yes,” she says, almost resolutely. “That is over. This is all that matters now.”

He seems satisfied enough. “And you will behave for Carolyn?”

“I make no promises. But I will do the job, and I’ll do it well.”

“I’m sure,” he says with a smile, almost proud. “You are sensational, after all.”

She smiles back then. “Of course I am.”

“But,” he sighs on an exhale, scratching the back of his head. “If we are going to do this, then there is something you should see.”

She narrows an eyebrow. “Okay?”

He reaches into his coat pocket then, produces an envelope which he hands to her. His face has gone grey.

She takes it from him with a frown, noticing the sudden tension in his shoulders. The envelope is a sort of off-yellow colour, addressed in beautiful cursive, with a red raven seal that has already been broken.

She goes deadpan. “You want me to read your mail?”

“Oksana,” he murmurs gravely, making her bones freeze. “It is from your father.”

She stares hard at him, confused, before finally bursting out into raucous laughter which frightens off a nearby robin. “ _No_ ,” she rasps with a chuckle, shaking her head. “My father is dead, Konstantin.”

He says nothing, and suddenly that laughter is dying a death in her throat.

 _Most of them, sure,_ he’d said in Rome.

Suddenly she’s up, falling out of the swing seat and letting the blanket and the envelope drop to the grass. When he tries to hand it to her again, she recoils. “No,” she blurts sharply, her heart slamming in her chest. “I don’t want it.”

“You should have it.”

“Why do _you_ have it!?” She exclaims, her psyche exposed on her face, wildly vulnerable. “What does he want, what does–” she trails off in a sharp sigh, needing to pause before her breathing gets away from her.

“Well, he wants to talk,” he explains, cautiously. “To see you.”

She barks out a bitter laugh. “That will be a cold day in Hell.”

“I know.”

Her eyes go wide suddenly. “Does he know where I am?” she breathes out, anger flaring in her cheeks. “If you told him where I am I _swear–_ ”

“Of course not,” he interrupts softly, standing and reaching for her hand. “I would not do that. You know that.”

She folds her arms defensively across her chest, looks down at her feet, her face storming with emotion.

“ _Golubushka_ ,” he says, cupping her arm with one hand, placing the other over his chest. “I swear in my heart. No more lies.”

Villanelle swallows hard, nods briefly – her eyes shine in the moonlight and he _knows_ , knows she will be angrier now, more determined than ever.

It could be a good thing, he supposes.

From inside his coat pocket, his phone rings, intrusive to their private moment. With a comforting squeeze to her arm, Konstantin steps away, brings the phone to his ear with an apprehensive “hello?”

_“We’ve had a slight hiccup.”_

“Oh?” He says, mindful of Villanelle’s curious eye. “What might that be?”

_“It’s Eve.”_

“What about her?”

“Well,” Carolyn says, standing over her son’s shoulder as he pulls up an internet history, detailing flight information from an Easyjet account. “It would seem she’s gone. Booked a one way ticket on a flight out of Gatwick airport.”

_“To where?”_

Kenny is already navigating through the information in front of him to pull up a destination airport. When he finds it, Carolyn pinches the bridge of her nose hard, and sighs so sharply down the phone that Kenny shivers.

“Where do you think?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably a good time to mention that this was mostly written before season 3 aired, hence why i've decided that villanelle's dad is the asshole, not her mother (in canon we hate tatiana)
> 
> come say hi on twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments and feedback are my lifeblood :)


	7. Alharca

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve is so screwed.

_[noun] — an extraordinary or violent emotional reaction to an issue_

According to the most recent weather reports, the state of Alaska has been having a wonderfully mild and dry summer so far this year. In light of this, Eve had packed thin sweatshirts, her sunglasses, some jeans; left the vast majority of her wardrobe behind in North Watford, figuring that _hey, I’ll work it out later._

(She’s never been the spontaneous type – not until Villanelle, at least. She blames her, really.)

So when Eve wakes on the morning of what should be her second day in The Land of the Midnight Sun, her rational prepares her for the sound of rain against the window, the warm sun on her face, and in some small ways her brain is already gearing itself up for a long day of searching the town for the woman who’d shot her.

(She’s no idea what she’ll do when she finds her – she’ll work that out later, too.)

But there is no rain, no sun. When Eve wakes, the walls of her hotel room are no longer brick but dull grey, and the window is gone and she has no bed, rather she is slumped uncomfortably in an uncomfortable chair. Her eyes adjust and she becomes aware of a table in front of her, one that definitely had never belonged in her room.

Eve had left London on the night of August 10th. Her watch presently reads August 12th.

She shoots up in the chair, ignores how her body protests the action. She realises, with a creeping nervousness, that she has very little recollection of the last two days.

Her next thought is of how dry her mouth is, how heavy her head feels, and she can only conclude that she’s coming out of some sort of sedation.

Panic saturates her system, and she forces her brain to retrace her every move. She remembers landing at Anchorage airport early morning, groggy having drifted in and out of fitful sleep the whole flight over; she remembers collapsing onto her hotel bed, but only allowing herself a few hours sleep; she’d showered and made for town, armed with the only photo of Villanelle that she’d brought with her.

The mugshot with the bandana. Unflattering, and yet somehow Villanelle still looked like a movie star.

Eve recalls showing the picture to the employees in Walmart, to the waiters in the seafood restaurant, to the people in the shops which sold the nicest clothes because really, where else would Villanelle be lurking. They all seemed unsure when Eve showed them the photo – like they knew her, had maybe seen her once or twice, but couldn’t quite place her.

Eve remembers her own outrage at that – how was it possible for other people to have seen Villanelle and paid practically no attention to her?

She had gone drinking that night – to the Wise Bear, one of only two pubs in town. There, the televisions behind the bar had been playing various news reports detailing the recent murder of a young woman named Phoebe Wells, right here in town. She’d been stabbed in her own bed, apparently, and _yes,_ Eve remembers thinking, _Villanelle is definitely here somewhere._

But suddenly the subsequent images are growing blurred in her mind’s eye, scattered and incomplete. What had happened after that? Had she made it home? Had she walked, or gotten a taxi? She doesn’t remember this sweater. Had she changed her clothes?

She thinks she can recall a woman beside her at the Wise Bear – it’s gappy, soured by gin and something else, but she imagines herself sliding Villanelle’s mugshot across the bartop, revealing her to the other woman. Had she known Villanelle? Eve thinks she can hear her in her mind, saying _yes, she doesn’t live far, let’s go._ Is she just imagining that part? Where the fuck is she?

There is a heavy clang from across the room, metal shifting, and suddenly the door is open and someone is entering.

The woman is beautiful, perhaps around Eve’s age – she wears a crisp white blouse with black slacks, satchel slung over her shoulder; the look is completed by high heels that succeed in making her appear ten times taller. Her hair is chestnut brown, short and curved to the sharp line of her jaw. Her eyes are bright, strike familiarity in Eve, and she realises that this must be the woman from the bar, the woman she’d shown Villanelle’s photograph to.

Apparently, that had been a huge mistake.

“Good morning, Eve,” she greets with a polite smile. Her accent is distinctively French. The clack of her heels echo around the room as she walks further into the room, holding two glasses of water. Eve wonders how she could possibly have managed to open the door. It occurs to her that there is likely several people involved here, in whatever this is.

It makes her heart race. When the woman sets the glasses down on the table, gesturing for Eve to take on, Eve doesn’t, remains frozen in place.

It doesn’t seem to faze her. “My name is Hélène,” she says, levelling Eve with an all-too-pleasant smile. “It is lovely to finally be together like this. My organisation has been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time.”

Eve frowns, confused. _Organisation? What org–_

Oh.

_Oh._

It hits her then, like a bullet in her back. How completely and utterly _fucked_ she is.

Her face must give away her sudden conclusion, for Hélène is chuckling jovially, slipping her satchel off her shoulder and letting it drop to the floor. “You’re a hard woman to find.”

_Stupid, stupid, stupid. Should have stayed in London._

_Should have stayed in London._

Eve’s cheeks burn with her fear, her self-criticism, her stomach churning, and she’s overcome with the need to go on the defensive.

“So what happens now?” she grumbles, levelling Hélène with a glare. “You gonna torture me? Starve me? Or are you just gonna save yourself the trouble and kill me right away?”

She’d be unsurprised by any method the Twelve may employ.

“Come now, Eve,” Hélène sighs, rolling her eyes. “I’m reasonable. Some of my colleagues may opt for the more…direct method, it’s true. But I personally believe in…oh, what is the expression in English…quo pro?”

Eve frowns. “Quid pro quo?”

“Ah, yes! Thank you. Yes, I think we can help each other.”

“What exactly is it that you think I’ll be able to offer you?”

“I would like to ask you some questions about a former employee of mine.”

“You couldn’t have done that in the pub?”

Hélène smiles, but it’s different now. Less welcoming, as impatience creeps in. “I detest _pubs_.”

She takes the empty seat across from Eve then, reaching inside her satchel for a manilla folder. Eve watches over the rim of her glass as the folder is placed on the table, takes a long sip to disguise the nervous twitch of her neck when the satchel slides to the floor with a dull thud.

A familiar photo is pulled from the folder, swivelled upright in Eve’s direction. Hélène taps her nail against Villanelle’s prison bandana, looking expectantly at Eve.

“This is the woman you were looking for. Why?”

Eve quickly weighs her options. She can lie, deny everything, plead the fifth until she’s blue in the face. Until eventually Hélène gets bored, starts tormenting her with weapons other than her bite.

“Why does that matter to you?” She asks, opting to stall.

“Perhaps we are looking for her, too.”

Eve’s stomach twists at that. It all flashes through her mind then; Paris, the knife, the blood under her fingernails, the lipstick, the flowers on her doorstep, nine missed calls and three voicemails, and everything she’d felt and seen and done in Rome. Her chest aches with the memory of it, the intensity of it, but she schools her face to reveal none of it.

“I’m not looking for her,” Eve says, resolutely. “It’s not my job anymore.”

Hélène smiles then, sweetly, like maybe she already knows that Eve is lying. “So, what brought you to Alaska, Eve?”

Eve’s own strained smile falters. “I’m sorry?”

“Visiting family? A vacation?”

“I…had never been. Thought the weather would be nice this time of year.”

“The weather is shit this time of year. Did you have a plan?”

“What?”

“Well, it’s just that I see here your ticket was one-way, non-transferable. Upping sticks?”

The expressions sounds awkward in her French lilt, but Eve’s palms sweat nervously regardless. Unsure of how to proceed now, she does the only thing she can think of – she bites.

“I don’t really think that’s any of your business.”

Hélène hums, still smiling, like she may burst out laughing at any given moment. Eve suspects she is foolish to think that they will allow any part of her to remain private. Unless she were to fold, tell them everything they want to hear. She bites onto the inside of her cheek, cracks her toes inside her boots, and clears her throat in a way which lets Hélène know that she should change her line of enquiry.

Hélène’s stare is cool, her voice serene and smug. “What is the nature of your relationship with Villanelle?”

Eve grips the chair handles, her stance growing positively insolent. “I don’t understand the question.”

Hélène’s eyes flash; victory dances there as she leans back in her chair. “I hear you left your husband.”

“Is that a question?”

“I’m just curious. Did he find out you were fucking a younger woman?”

Eve snaps at that. “ _Screw you_ ,” she seethes through gritted teeth, overcome. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then _tell_ me,” Hélène implores her emphatically. “I’m giving you an out here, Eve. In the grand scheme of things, we don’t want you. We’re willing to forgive your little…mishap, with Raymond, but only if you help us in return. Quid-pro-quo, you see? All you need to do is tell us where Villanelle is, and you can go back to London or Alaska or-wherever the Hell you’d like. It’s really very simple.”

“I don’t _know_ where she is!” Eve exclaims, and she’s standing now, shouting down at the other woman. “I haven’t seen her for months! I haven’t so much as heard a–”

And then she stops. The world slows around her, and she stops.

Hélène looks up at her, face set perfectly in stone, but her eyes are bright, almost maniacal.

“Wait,” Eve breathes out, voice catching as her brain finally, finally catches up. “Go _back_ to Alaska?”

Hélène is grinning then, rising out of her chair to be at eye level with Eve.

Eve steps back on instinct, the chair scraping on the tile. “Where the fuck am I?” She demands, her voice trembling. “Where did you bring me?”

Hélène just smiles, rounds the table slowly, the clack of her heels shaking the walls. “Let’s just say it’s one of those places that’s _extremely_ difficult to escape from.”

Eve’s bones turn wooden, and she’s helpless to do anything other than watch the other woman step into her personal space. She swallows as her back meets the wall, feels her anger rising, bubbling, racing towards a climax. It’s terrifying.

“You know, I really thought she would come looking for you again,” Hélène murmurs, sighing in disappointment as her eyes blaze over Eve’s shoulder, where the bullet had lodged. “But she really doesn’t miss you at all, does she?”

Hélène leans in then, a devious grin curling at her mouth. “I suppose obsession _does_ die.”

“Fuck you,” Eve spits, the fingers of her right hand clenching together hard in a fist she’d spent weeks practicing.

The hit lands hard, with a crack that has Hélène yelping as she stumbles backwards, fingers pressing to her mouth as blood leaks down her chin. Eve, on nothing more than panic and muscle memory, strikes her again as she’s stumbling, a more concentrated hit that sends her crashing to her knees, hunched over just enough that Eve can see the gun, tucked into the crook of her back.

Eve lunges for it, dispels the flashbacks of Rome and her own trauma by swinging it down, right on Hélène’s head with a thunderous crack. It’s effective – she goes down immediately, slumping awkwardly to the side as blood starts to pool under her face. Eve’s breath rushes out, gun clenched in her hands as she realises, with startling clarity, that Hélène isn’t breathing.

 _“Shit,”_ Eve gasps, dropping the gun to the floor. _Motherfucker._ How had that even _happened?_

But there’s no time to process it. Someone is going to come in and find her standing over a dead body. She needs to move, now.

With a strangled groan, she bends over, picks up the gun again from where she’d dropped it. It’s wet with blood – she wipes it quickly with her shirt, notices a sliver of silver peeking out of Hélène’s blazer pocket. When Eve realises it’s a pocketknife, small but sharp when extended, she swipes it, promptly cursing herself for choosing to wear trousers with no pockets. She opts to slide it inside her sock, ignores the discomfort as she steps around Hélène's body and darts for the door, her heart pounding in her chest.

The door is unlocked, and she slips out into the hallway. It’s long but empty, and she bears left, shifting all of her focus onto finding a way out, into the open air and away from the sudden feeling that the walls are going to crush her.

The hallway is dimly lit, and sparse of any kind of signage that may indicate the type of building she is in. She pads down it swiftly, keeping to the wall, convinced that she will come across someone at any moment. She has the gun, and the magazine has four bullets left. She thinks, if it comes down to it, she will shoot anyone who stands in her way.

(She prays it won’t come to that.)

Everything around her is fairly unremarkable, so much so she starts to question whether or not Hélène really had been a part of the Twelve. She’d always envisioned any kind of secret location of theirs to be positively decadent, laden with statues and African rugs and Russian artworks. A ballroom next door to a torture chamber. That’s how she’d pictured it. But everything is grey, and dark, and inconsistent with the image she’d always had. Did that mean Hélène had been lying? Or did it mean that Eve had a lot further still to go? If she’d started in the torture chamber, where did that leave the ballroom? Should she not have found it by now?

She reaches the end of the hallway, is faced with a choice: directly in front of her is a staircase, leading up into some other dark area of the building, and to her right is another hallway, seemingly endless.

Her feet take her forward, up the stairs two at a time. At the top, she finds another door. It’s unlocked; in fact, the chain lock has been broken off. She steps through it into another hallway. The paint is chipping off the walls. Eve grips onto her gun as she rounds the corner, but nobody greets her. Instead she is confronted with shelves, stretching long and high on either side of her, lined with dozens and dozens of boxes. Could this be some type of warehouse?

Perhaps one of the boxes contain something which could give her some sort of indication of where she is. With this thought in mind, she reaches up, pulls one down onto the floor, and then another one. In the half-light, she opens them up, sorts through the various papers inside them, but they are mostly in Russian, give no indication of any names or places. The only discernible thing at all is a distinctive blue-purple cube, encased in a broken black circle – a logo of some kind, maybe?

Eve does not recognise it. She tries three more boxes, finds nothing of value, and it makes no sense. There has to be something of importance here, there _has_ to be.

Frustrated and aware that she could still be found at any moment, Eve quickly closes the boxes back up and lifts them into their original places once more, before continuing down the hallway, drawn in by the light bleeding through. It’s brighter than anywhere else so far.

It’s a kitchen, Eve realises. A giant, industrial-type kitchen. She creeps in, feels compelled to duck down behind the countertop so she can fully take in her surroundings without the fear of being spotted. It is a world of stainless steel: there are two ovens, a grill, a deep-fryer, all along the back wall; a massive walk-in freezer sits on the other side of the room; above the long table in the centre of the room hangs every cooking apparatus she thinks exists – there are pots, sauté pans, woks, saucepans, tongs, spatulas, ladles. They all hang deadly still. There are also shelving units bolted to the floor, stacked with mixing bowls, dinner plates, salad plates, pie dishes, and more wine glasses than she’s ever seen in her life. Eve moves behind one such unit, peeking through the plates and the glasses to cast her eye around the room, hopeful to find another way out.

An echoing thud sounds then, from somewhere just out of sight. Eve jolts, grips her gun tightly. Someone else is here. Swallowing her sudden fear, Eve tiptoes to hide behind another shelving unit, tries to poke her head around just enough to get a look at where the sound is coming from. The kitchen is longer than she’d first realised. There are several more shelving units along her row, and running parallel to them is another large, stainless steel table. There are boxes upturned upon it; papers scattered everywhere, an avalanche of white which eclipses the whole table and spills onto the floor.

No-one else is visible, and it is deathly silent all of a sudden. Eve swallows a breath, scared to distort the atmosphere lest she bring it all crashing down.

But in the quiet, she hears it. A quiet shuffle from the other side of the unit. Eve doesn’t think, draws her gun, takes less than two seconds before she’s lunging to the side, taking aim.

She freezes, grip tightening as she comes face to face with the business end of another pistol, and the woman who wields it so professionally, ten feet away.

“ _Villanelle?_ ”


	8. Paroxysm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reunion.

_paroxysm: [noun] — a sudden outburst of emotion_

Eve wants to laugh, because _of course_. Of all the industrial kitchens in the world, she just had to find herself in the same one as her.

Her mind races, rationalises. Villanelle could _kill_ her, right now. Shoot her in the head and walk out of here. It’d only be fair, right? Retribution for Rome?

But it’s a fleeting thought, for her mind betrays her pretty quickly; moves on from notions of murder to notice just how _gorgeous_ Villanelle looks. Her hair is tied back in a loose, messy ponytail; she wears what can only be described as a ‘burglar’s’ outfit, black and tight and paired with knee-length Prada boots. She always did like dressing the part.

_Damn her._

She’d thought she’d have more time, thought she’d have figured out something to say by the time she saw her again. _I’ll work it out later,_ she’d told herself. But Eve realises that later has come, later is _now_ , and she needs to speak, to say something before Villanelle can say _anything_ because that would come closer to killing her than anything else has so far.

Eve wants to say something clever, something that will draw her attention and insult her at the same time. Something that will give her an edge, the power and the confidence to be able to stand in front of her and say _I survived you._

But she’s a step behind, always one fucking step behind.

“Wow,” Villanelle murmurs, gun raised, transfixed. “You have bangs.”

And she looks so smug, so arrogant and so goddamn _beautiful,_ that Eve shoots.

“Eve!” Villanelle shrieks, ducking down as the bullet whizzes past her, meeting the steel fridge with a clang. “What the fuck!?”

“You _asshole!_ ” Eve is shaking as she fires at the ground by Villanelle’s crouched figure; her heart is pounding and her eyes are glassing over and fuck if this doesn’t hurt more than she thought it would.

“Will you stop that!?” Villanelle exclaims from the floor, scrambling round the corner to put a countertop between them as she gets back to her feet. “You’re going to get us caught!”

“What the fuck are you even doing here!?” Eve exclaims, throwing her hands out to the side, eyes wide and wild. “What, did you break in!?”

Villanelle’s jaw drops. “Are you _judging_ me right now? Are you _serious_?”

The gun goes off again, causes the pans hanging midair behind Villanelle’s head to clatter and chime. “I have every right to judge you!”

“Oh, because I _shot you, boohoo_.”

Furious, Eve fires off another shot, nowhere near either of them. It hits a nearby shelf, loosens it just enough at one side that it comes undone, and every single plate goes crashing to the floor in a cacophony of horrific sound that lasts for several seconds.

Villanelle winces throughout the whole thing, glares at Eve when it’s over. “Always making a mess,” she growls.

Eve feels her fists shaking. She storms to Villanelle, waving the gun in her face. “You’ve got some nerve saying that to me,” she snaps, her chest heaving.

Villanelle’s neck goes red then, and she stalks to meet Eve halfway in her stride, fearless and confident as though Eve _isn’t_ armed and highly motivated. “You ruined _everything_ ,” she seethes, and it’s only then that Eve becomes aware of the gun against her stomach.

It infuriates her, and thrills her, all at once.

“Come on then,” Eve taunts her with a snarl, stepping further into the press of the gun, her voice trembling with rage. “Finish it. Kill me. And make sure I’m actually _dead_ this time before you walk away.”

Villanelle furrows her brow, breathes with her whole chest, and stares at Eve, hard. A long, tense moment passes between them, and Eve knows, _knows_ what Villanelle is going to do before she’s even done it. Can tell in the way her eyes soften, in the way her lips part.

As soon as Villanelle has lowered her gun, Eve moves. She takes two quick steps back, raises her free fist, and strikes Villanelle hard across the face.

A gasp dies in Villanelle’s throat as her neck twists, but unlike Hélène, her feet remain firmly planted. She does not stumble. Her eyes flicker back to Eve, wide and manic, and through the blood between her teeth, a grin curls at her mouth, sadistic, challenging, dark in a way that makes Eve go from powerful to utterly helpless.

“Oh, _Eve_ ,” she exhales hard, excitedly like she’s impressed, and Eve takes another step back, suddenly centred, suddenly coming down from the charge of adrenaline that had seized her the moment Hélène had got in her face. Villanelle is looking at her now how she used to in the beginning – bloodlust, fascination, curiosity. Eve supposes that that works here, in this space where nothing works _at all_. They can manage hatred, can just about manage fascination – it’s anything else that would surely ruin them.

In an instant, Villanelle is on her. Their guns clatter to the floor as Villanelle grabs her, hoisting her with so much strength that they sweep over the countertop and crash to the floor. Eve screams, twists her body around in an attempt to drag herself away, but Villanelle’s hands manipulate her ankles, yank her back.

“Let me go!” Eve growls, lashing out at Villanelle’s face the second she is flipped onto her back. She hits her again – the same cheek, for good measure – but Villanelle does not like it this time. With a firm hand, she slaps Eve back, her fingers digging into her jawline as her head cranes to the side.

The shock of it is infuriating. “Bitch,” Eve spits at her.

“Mirror,” Villanelle snarls back, pinning her harder to the ground.

Eve grunts angrily, forcing her hands back up to Villanelle’s face, desperate to claw at her skin. She pushes, digs her nails in to scratch, but she can’t get it right, for Villanelle is twisting away, or rather, is being pulled away.

Is being pulled–

Eve realises with a fright that the kitchen is suddenly filling with armed men, their feet-fall hurried and furious as they pour into the room, shouting in angry Russian. Two men yank Villanelle into the air, throw her to her knees on the floor. She cries out angrily, makes immediately to engage them but they subdue her arms, one brutish hand fisting around her ponytail to hold her in place.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she spits at Eve, as the other woman is dragged to her feet in a fit of anger and panic.

“Me!?” Eve exclaims, jerking her body in protest against the crushing weight of arms around her chest. “How is this my fault!?”

“You had the gun!”

“Oh fuck _off_ ,” Eve bellows. The arms around her tighten then, and she blinks, almost as if into full consciousness, and _shit_. She realises that she’s been caught, that she’d killed someone and she’d run and now she’s been _caught_. Suddenly her heart is beating in her mouth and her body is on fire, and she wishes she’d never gotten on that stupid fucking plane at Gatwick airport.

There are hands on her chest, dangerously close to her breasts; they squeeze, hard, and her face must contort with a cringe in that moment, for across from her Villanelle is seeing red.

“You want to lose those hands?” she growls at him, baring her teeth, a tiger ready to pounce.

She’s smacked for that, harder than both of Eve’s hits combined. The room fills with the sound of it, sharp and cracking on her cheek – Eve has to stifle a gasp at the way her head snaps around.

But Villanelle just grins through the blood, her eyes shining as she touches deft fingers to her cheek and lip, where the skin has now split. Eve thinks, from that inexplicable glint, that the woman might explode, blow all of them and herself sky-high.

It’s truly terrifying.

There is a series of sharp Russian sentences exchanged between the few men closest; Eve can’t pretend to make sense of it, but she assumes that a general consensus has been reached when a declarative “ _poydem!_ ” is hollered out to the room. Suddenly everyone is moving in a flurry, crowding Eve and Villanelle and forcing them to move towards the door.

Villanelle pouts up at one of them, allowing herself to well up. “I don’t want to,” she whines, sniffling and making a show of digging her heels into the ground, the way a child would.

It doesn’t work – the butt of a rifle jams into her back, driving her forward a few steps, and Eve watches the way her face morphs from carefully wounded to blindingly furious.

They’re pushed through doors, dragged down the stairs and along the hallway, back to the same room that Eve had escaped from not half an hour ago. Eve, through the panic already saturating her system, experiences a brief moment of horror before she enters the room, has to steel herself for the disastrous, bloody state that she’d left it in.

She is confused, however, has to wonder if this is perhaps a different room. The floor is clean, buffed and shining, and there is a distinct lack of a dead body. Nobody would suspect that any crime had ever taken place here.

It’s the same room, though, Eve concludes, noticing the the slight scuffing on the tile from where she’d scraped her chair backwards. They must have found Hélène immediately, right after Eve had fled.

But then, why hadn’t they found Eve sooner? Was this a part of their plan? Had they brought her back here to mess with her?

Her brain burns with these questions as she and Villanelle are left alone in the room, sealed in with a loud _clang_ , and it’s when she looks over at Villanelle that it all becomes startlingly clear to her.

They’d _wanted_ them to find one another.

They had wanted to see if this issue would resolve itself, save them getting their hands dirty.

It’s obvious to Eve now, why they didn’t search them for weapons, why they didn’t cuff them, why they’ve left them alone together. All they have done is move their fight from one room to another, waiting to see if they will kill each other.

It almost makes Eve want to save Villanelle’s life, just to spite them.

She supposes, however, that they’ll take the job unto themselves in no time; the “direct method”, as Hélène had referred to it. That ought to terrify Eve, should be driving her to pull the lock apart with her bare hands, to batter the door down and run for her life.

But all she can think about is Villanelle, sitting atop the table, letting her legs swing back and forth.

She looks tired. That maniacal smile she’d been wearing is quite gone now; her eyes are pink, lids sagging, and her face hangs loose and long. The hair around her face is loose, having come partially undone from her ponytail; Eve realises she’s yet to see Villanelle with her hair down, suddenly longs to see her drag the hair-tie from her head and run her fingers through her blonde locks. Eve imagines they would light up the room. She wonders at her skincare routine and her perfect fingernails, wonders how she’s been sleeping, _if_ she’s been sleeping, wonders what she’s been doing this whole time. Has she been just as miserable? Just as alone?

 _But_ _no,_ Eve protests internally, _she_ _shot me. What does_ she _have to be miserable about?_

“You may as well sit,” Villanelle says, interrupting the whirlwind in Eve’s mind. “They will not be back for hours.”

“Oh, and I suppose you’d know?”

“This is not the first time I have been tortured by them,” is Villanelle’s simple answer. “So yes. I know.”

Eve closes her mouth after that, takes a seat on the floor against the wall and brings her knees to her chest. Her eyes fixate on the part of the floor that she’d reduced Hélène to, bleeding and lifeless. It doesn’t even smell.

Raymond had lingered for days, clinging to her nose hairs. Does this mean she is adapting?

Somewhere in the self-absorbed cloud in her mind, she realises what Villanelle had just revealed – a detail from her past, another piece of her life. For Eve, it sticks like glue, tormenting, and she finds that she can’t shake the image of Villanelle being hurt.

It sticks like glue, tormenting, but it’s also almost cathartic, like picking at PVA once it has congealed.

“Where are we?” Eve asks, after a long moment of tense silence.

“The Netherlands,” Villanelle replies. “Two hours from Amsterdam.”

“Amsterdam?” Eve’s eyes widen – she hadn’t expected that she’d been kidnapped across the continents.

“Yes. Giethoorn village. It’s perfect, actually. There are no roads here, only rivers and bridges. Very difficult to run away from.”

“What kind of design is _that_?”

Villanelle shrugs, blows out her cheeks. “A good one, if you want to build a secret terrorist retreat.”

“Mm.”

“I am surprised they found you,” Villanelle admits after a beat, her face giving nothing away. “I heard that you’d died.”

Eve scowls. “Yeah, well, not quite, no thanks to _you_.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes at that, so dramatically that Eve swears she can hear them. She expects a biting retort, a sarcastic comment, a general insult directed at the sweater she’d worn that day in Rome or the no-doubt hilarious sight she’d been to behold when she’d been passed out face down.

But Villanelle is quiet, staring at the door as if she hadn’t heard Eve at all. _Or maybe she just doesn’t give a_ shit, Eve dares to wonder as she watches the other woman. Villanelle glares sternly at the bolt lock on the door, and when it refuses to disintegrate, Eve swallows, decides that she needs to fill the silence before she suffocates under the weight of it.

“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Nope.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

Four seconds pass. “Are you working for them again?”

Villanelle deadpans, throws her arms out to her surroundings. “Yes, the Twelve often keep their employees in dungeons awaiting interrogation.”

“You don’t have to be a dick about it,” Eve huffs, her cheeks glowing rosy.

“Don’t ask stupid questions, then.”

“Y’know what, fine, okay, we just won’t talk.”

“Fine.”

Villanelle’s eyes flicker over to her briefly then, take in the wild curls around her face, the lithe form of her body, the way she hugs her knees to her chest and rests her chin there.

Eve returns her gaze after a minute, and the other woman deflates almost immediately. Eve watches as she exhales gently, the lines in her forehead smoothing out.

“I followed one of them here,” Villanelle murmurs.

“What?”

“One of the men. He is an adviser to the Dutch Prime Minister. I followed him here.”

Eve frowns. “Why?”

“Because he is a Keeper.”

“I–have no idea what that means.”

“Good,” Villanelle sighs sharply, impatience creeping in. “It’s better you don’t know. It doesn’t involve you.”

“Uh, it kind of _does–_ ”

“No,” Villanelle interrupts with a tone of finality. “It doesn’t.”

Eve blinks, disbelieving. “Am I allowed to ask _why_?”

“Because you are dead,” Villanelle replies, as if it were the simplest, most logical answer in the world. “Dead people don’t need to worry themselves with matters for the living. You’re lucky like that.”

Eve has to scoff. “Of all the words I could use to describe myself, it’s unlikely that I’d ever fucking go with ‘lucky’.”

“You can call yourself whatever you want. But this is still nothing to do with you. You ended it, Eve, don’t you remember?”

“That’s not fair,” Eve blurts out. Villanelle turns to her, alert, and Eve bites her tongue to stifle her words but they fall through her teeth anyway.“I was a _mess_ and you _knew_ that.”

“I could have helped you. We could have been happy.”

“We…I…” Her mouth tastes like copper as she trails off, shaking her head. She has no idea how she would’ve ended that sentence anyway.

A sharp burst of air escapes Villanelle then, as she shakes her head and rolls her eyes, more at herself than at Eve. “Whatever,” she mutters under her breath. “That offer has expired. I have more important things I need to do.”

Eve has to scoff through the sting of that. “Like following Dutch politicians out to a secret terrorist retreat in the middle of nowhere?”

“You forgot the boats. There are no roads here–”

“ _Whatever_ ,” Eve breathes out forcefully, exasperated. “If you don’t want to tell me that’s – whatever. I don’t care.”

Eve glares down at the floor, trying to ignore the heat of Villanelle’s eyes on her. Goosebumps prickle at the back of her neck, taunting her. Eventually she caves, lifts her head just enough to see the smirk that tugs at the corner of the other woman’s mouth; that smug, knowing smirk that lets Eve know that Villanelle most decidedly has called bullshit.

And Eve hates that, hates that she’s so transparent in Villanelle’s eyes, while she gets to go on in her enigmatic shell, only ever revealing just enough to keep Eve enthralled.

Would the spell break then, Eve wonders, if she were to learn everything? Would Eve’s appetite for her past, her personality, the little peccadillos as well as her worst crimes, be sated at last?

If Eve could believe that, maybe she’d still have some sense of semblance of her sanity left. Maybe she’d sleep better at night.

Now though, this is different. Villanelle is childish, certainly, likes to throw a tantrum, likes the attention it garners, but Eve knows her well enough now to know that this, right now, isn’t that. Right now, Villanelle looks more human than Eve has ever seen her, and the implications of what that could mean cause her stomach to twist itself into knots.

“We need to get out of here,” she breathes out, more to herself than Villanelle, but the other woman hears it anyway, levels her with a stern look.

“We?”

Eve frowns. “Are you planning on _staying_?”

“Well I wasn’t planning on going anywhere with _you_.”

“You’re–kidding me, right?”

Villanelle is absolutely _not_ kidding, and suddenly Eve’s stomach is knotting harder.

“But...I...”

Villanelle raises an eyebrow. “You what?”

“I came to Alaska,” Eve defends, her voice wobbling. “For you.”

That means something. Means _everything._

But Villanelle just shrugs, like she couldn’t give a shit. “And now you should let me go.”

And it truly, _truly_ , might be easier to in this moment; to severe all ties with her and walk away. She could blame the hurt of indifference, tell herself she made the right choice in the end.

Except, if it were that simple, Eve would’ve walked away after Bill. God fucking knows she’s tried, tried every day, but –

“I can’t,” she whispers, forcing herself to allow a shred of honesty between them. “I tried.”

Any flicker of emotion that she thinks she sees in Villanelle’s eyes is gone as quick as it had come, replaced with something cold, detached. “Try harder, then. You made it very clear that you would rather be alone than be with me. Maybe you don’t think I have any feelings, but I do. You broke my heart. And Konstantin was right, I have to get over that. I should move on with my life. I shouldn’t be tied to you anymore.”

“I-I don’t understand,” Eve stammers, her chest constricting. “You…you _wanted_ me to come, you…you sent that photo…”

She trails off, clamped by the utterly blank look on Villanelle’s face, and it’s in this moment that she realises, _oh._

Villanelle hadn’t sent that email. It had been the Twelve. Villanelle hadn’t reached out. She really had walked away that day in Rome with no intention of turning back.

“Villanelle–”

“When they come back, you need to keep them talking. Distract them. Tell them how much you hate me – that should be easy for you, right?”

“ _Oksana_ –” and suddenly it hits Eve, slams her full force that she is being serious, she’s ending everything, and Eve is going to be alone, she’s going to _lose_ her, and –

“Let me do the rest,” Villanelle continues. “As soon as you see an opening, go.”

She could throw up. “I…I’m not _leaving_ you, I–”

“You didn’t have a problem before,” Villanelle points out, her soft Russian accent bubbling and fuck, she’s laughing. She’s actually _laughing._ How stupid could Eve have been, to think they could ignore Rome?

At Eve’s strained expression, Villanelle slides off the table, stalks over to her with her hands shoved nonchalantly in her pant pockets. “What’s wrong, Eve? Did you finally realise that you have nobody else? Did you realise that home wasn’t all it was cracked up to be? Did you think that maybe I would be stupid enough to waste any more time on you?”

Eve blushes furiously, caught between confusion and outrage. “I…I thought–”

“What?” Villanelle presses, her eyes glinting with furious tears which she refuses to shed. “What did you think, mm? That I was weak? That I would wait forever?”

“I thought you _loved_ me.”

Villanelle laughs again because how dare she throw that in her face now. Is she mocking her? She laughs so hard a tear escapes, burning and dissipating as it slides across the heat of her cheek. “But how _can_ I, Eve? I don’t know what that is, after all.”

Eve’s whole throat twitches as she stares up at her, her desperation leaking out into her eyes. “I was wrong...Oksana, I was wrong, I...I got it all so wrong.”

“Yes,” Villanelle agrees, all traces of humour now gone from her face. “You did. And now it’s too late. If we don’t die here then I’ll make damned sure you and I never meet again.”

Then she’s turning, heading back to the table, and Eve can’t help herself.

“You can’t just walk away!”

And it’s stupid, so stupid, because Eve knows what she’s going to say back, can see it plain as day on the other woman’s face before it’s even out there.

“I already did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops don't hate me :)


	9. Quartervois

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> no hate towards those who like kiwi

_quartervois: [noun] — a critical decision or turning point in one’s life_

  


  


When they come for Villanelle, it’s a reprieve. Eve is almost glad of it.

The silence that has filled the room has left her bereft; a chasm of distance that seems unlikely now to ever close, if it ever would have. Not a word has passed between them since Villanelle’s last biting retort, and Eve has found herself wishing in every second since for a do-over, a sequence of words that would somehow let them be at ease, if only briefly so they could figure out a means of escape.

She spends long moments expecting Villanelle to speak, to pander to her love for the sound of her own voice. But there are no words, in any order, in any language. The air is thick with a thousand half-sentences that Eve will never voice, and the effect of that is suffocating, so when they come for Villanelle, Eve is hopeful; hopeful that the tension will diffuse, that she’ll be able to breathe.

They man-handle Villanelle across the room and shove her through the door. She doesn’t look at Eve; shoots no silent assurances that she’ll be okay. Eve’s stomach churns in expectation anyway. The door slams shut, and she goes cold. The tension does not diffuse. The pang in her gut morphs, ache into anxiety, as if she has suddenly remembered where she is, and what it no doubt means when they ‘come for you’.

The grey walls mock her, refract the memories of Raymond and Hélène onto her shaking hands; she remembers their blood, their smell, their stillness. The table is bigger now that Villanelle no longer lounges across it; the urge to bang her fists against it twinges in her wrists.

It is too loud in her head to reconcile her thoughts. Too quiet in the room to reconcile anything else.

They return approximately one hour later, without Villanelle. Eve falters, but forces her legs to work, to follow them when they ask her to. She’s taken to the right, further down the hall to a larger room; at the outset Eve counts eight people, not including herself and the two men who’d brought her here. There are six men stationed at various points around the room, in various states of arms and defence, and in the middle of it all, with her hands bound, is Villanelle, flashing a carefree smile up at everyone around her from her chair. A bruise is blossoming around her eye and her lip is dark with blood; there is a new gash along her jawline, and her left fist is clenched, as though she may be fighting pain in that arm.

“Oh good,” she says, still with that smile, now directed straight at Eve. “You brought my worst enemy.”

“ _Russian_ ,” one of the men demand.

“ _Bite me_ ,” she mocks.

His eyes flash at that and he goes to backhand her, but another of them, the one standing by Villanelle, raises his hand to stop him.

Ah, Eve realises, as both hands lower. So there _is_ a chain of command.

“Sit,” the leader orders, directing Eve to the vacant chair directly across from Villanelle’s.

She hesitates for a second too long; a rough hand from behind grips onto her shoulder, forces her to sit where she’d been told.

Villanelle affords her the briefest of glances. Eve feels petulant anger flare in her fingertips.

The man between them – the one clearly in charge – is tall, well-groomed, carries himself with confidence that is television-worthy. Eve is sure she has seen him before, somewhere, online or in the news.

_I followed one of them here,_ Villanelle had said. _He is an adviser to the Dutch Prime Minister._

Before Eve can contemplate how the Hell a Dutch politician fits into all of this, he is speaking, commending her and Villanelle. “Quite the performance downstairs, ladies.”

Villanelle beams, shrugs as much as she can with her wrists tied. “Thank you.”

“You know, that sort of tension really ought to be fucked out.”

“Trust me, Greig, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“Shut up,” Eve hisses at Villanelle, her cheeks reddening.

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Villanelle mutters, rolling her eyes. “I watched you with your husband, I know exactly what kind of dirty shit you’re into.”

“ _Stop it, now_.”

“That must have made you angry,” Greig surmises wickedly in Villanelle’s direction. “Watching her fuck someone else.”

“Not really,” Villanelle shrugs, shifting against her restraints to get more comfortable. “Besides, she always thinks of me.”

“That’s not true!”

“ _Sure_.”

“Come now, Eve,” Greig huffs out a laugh. “Everyone in this _room_ knows that that isn’t true.”

Eve swallows hard. “You…how–”

“Your friend, Aaron Peel,” Greig grins. “His technology was certainly sophisticated. We were able to sneak a preview at one Mrs Eve Polastri.” He turns to Villanelle then, cocks his head to the side. “Until his untimely death, of course.”

“Bullshit,” Eve hisses, her eyes suddenly filling with nervous tears. “You don’t know shit about me.”

“Really?”

And he settles in front of her, accepting this challenge. “I know that your favourite colour is blue. Cobalt, to be exact. I know that you are allergic to kiwi. I know that you haven’t called your mother in almost six months. I know that you hated your father. And I know all about Villanelle.”

He leans in, taunts in her ear just loud enough to be heard across the room. “She haunts your dreams at night. You wear clothes that you think will get a reaction out of her. I know you think about her more than you ever thought about your husband, who, by the way, knew you were picturing her when you were having sex with him, but he ignored it. He really was too good for you.” He sighs then, stepping back. “You came across the world for her. Was it worth it?”

Eve’s breath trickles out in the brief silence that follows. She’s never felt more naked in all her life. She burns with the shame of it. It hits her now that she’s not going to make it out of here. Was it worth it?

Across from her, Villanelle’s eyes are wild, hazy, gleaming with self-validation and something equally horrified.

“What kind of psychopath is allergic to kiwi!?”

Eve feels her shoulders shake then, inexplicably furious as Villanelle’s face breaks into an iridescent, arrogant smile.

Greig grumbles, his neck twitching. “Really, Oksana. We warned you. You should have listened.”

“I don’t listen to anybody.”

“A decision you will not live to regret.”

“Then do it,” Villanelle snaps sharply, her eyes flashing. “Kill me now.”

Greig just looks at her, his face marred with something akin to sympathy. “Oh, Oksana,” he sighs, tutting. “Where’s the fun in that?”

He turns to Eve with a salacious grin then. “Perhaps our guest would like to do the honours.”

Eve falters. “Excuse me?”

He raises his gun then, walks towards Eve. She shrinks back with every step he takes.

“I’ll make you a deal, Eve Polastri. I believe the English word is ‘lifeline’,” he says, stopping in front of her. “You have a lifeline now, Eve.”

He points the gun straight at her, then flips it upside down, presenting her with the grip.

“Shoot her in the head,” Greig proposes, “and you will never hear from us again.”

Eve’s stomach plummets as the weapon is pressed into her hands. “ _No_.”

Raucous, unending laughter fills the room then, echoing like a nightmare off the walls as it bubbles and bursts, and it registers too late with Eve that the sound is coming from Villanelle.

“ _Please_ ,” the woman gasps through her giggling fit, “Eve is a coward! You expect her to shoot me!? She could not even stab me right!”

Eve’s hands twitch around the gun, barely perceptible. Greig notices anyway, hums in her ear:

“I think you and I both know what you’re capable of, Eve. Prove her wrong.”

“You’re pathetic,” Villanelle spits at her when their eyes meet. She is still laughing. “You know you can’t exist without me.”

“Stop it,” Eve chokes.

“You knew you’d come crawling back. I left you rotting and you _still_ flew right back to me.”

“Stop it!”

“I truly wonder what sickness you must have.”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Eve snaps, shooting up from her chair and thrusting the gun in Villanelle’s direction.

The men around them stare, leer with sadistic grins, but they are background noise. Only Eve and Villanelle exist in this moment; Eve, Villanelle, and the vacuum of space through which a bullet could rip at any moment.

Eve walks towards her, gun raised. Villanelle’s laughter is fading out, replaced with something challenging, something daring.

Eve stops, takes a second, reaches down to itch her ankle. She stares at Villanelle, deliberately.

Villanelle’s eyes flash, flicker to Eve’s foot, then back up again. Her face gives nothing away. She glares.

Eve glares harder. “Uncuff her,” Eve demands. “I want her on her knees.”

Greig nods his approval. Villanelle raises a suggestive eyebrow then as her hands are unbound, which Eve scoffs at. “Get down. _Now_.”

Villanelle complies, maintains eye contact as she sinks to her knees on the floor. Eve’s stomach flips, propels her forward, forward, forward, until the barrel of the gun is against her glabella. The power she possesses in this moment – to have her completely at her will – is not lost on her. It’s potently intoxicating.

Villanelle stares up at her beyond the gun with a blank face, slowly stretches her fingers towards Eve’s ankle.

Eve thanks any God that will listen.

Eve looks over her shoulder then, meets Greig’s eyes. “This was your plan all along, huh? Have me kill her for you?”

“You’ve killed several of our associates now. One more is hardly going to morally bankrupt you.”

Eve sighs shakily at that, turns back to Villanelle, her stomach suddenly roiling with uncertainty, with panic.

But there, in Villanelle’s eyes, are the assurances that had been absent earlier, when they’d dragged her from the room. The assurances she so desperately needs right now. It is bright, encouraging, maniacal. The last time she’d looked like this, Raymond had been howling on his knees between them, threatening them through blubbering wails.

But this isn’t like last time. This time, Eve is in control.

This time, it’s Eve’s choice.

“So I guess there was really no need then,” she whispers, just loud enough for Greig to hear.

“For what?”

Villanelle smirks at her then, traces her fingers along the knife in Eve’s sock – Hélène’s last gift.

“To search us.”

At that Eve raises the gun above Villanelle’s head, and fires.

Chaos descends. The man behind Villanelle collapses immediately, blood pooling from his head as he hits the floor. Villanelle has pulled the knife from Eve’s sock and sprung into action, jamming the blade up into another man’s chest as he lunges for Eve. She drives the knife in hard, uses the force of it to shove him backwards.

A shot rings out, sends another man flat on his face.

Another two men come for Villanelle, one on either side. Villanelle grabs the knife among the blood and jams it into his neck with a sharp groan, ramming her knee into his stomach as he punches at her ribs with weakening effort.

She pulls the knife back when she’s satisfied he’s dead, goes to spin and face down her other assailant, but it’s too late, hands are on her neck, crushing hard –

The walls explode with the sound of the gun, and he slumps forward, taking Villanelle down with him. She growls and rolls away, kicks his crotch for good measure as she scrambles back to her feet, only to be caught by a fist, clenching in her hair.

Greig wraps his arm around Villanelle’s shoulders, crushes her tight against him, whips a knife to the slick skin of her neck.

“Do it, Eve,” he spits, grinning madly. “She’s dead either way.”

Eve sees red, pulls the trigger.

His resounding howl splits the air. He collapses, clutching for the blood that streams from his shoulder. It gives Villanelle enough room to wriggle free and throw herself down onto the floor in search of her knife, but he chases her down with a painful snarl before she can grab it, his own knife jerking out at her, messily and without direction.

She grabs the hilt of his blade in her fists, locks on hard before it can enter her. With a growl behind her teeth, she pitches forward, knocking him backwards for a brief moment, but he’s stronger than her at this angle, a fact he’s acutely aware of. Her air evaporates with a sharp cry as he punches her in the stomach, her body jerking as he wrestles her onto her back and straddles her hips. He continues to bear down on her, snapping, violent, his knife inching closer to her chest, and for a second, Villanelle is sure she’s going to die.

But a long shadow falls over him then, and suddenly his head is jerking back as a gurgling howl rips into the room. Blood sprays from the gaping slash in his throat, pouring out to cover Villanelle’s face and chest, hot and thick and wet.

Eve clutches the knife – Hélène’s knife, the knife Villanelle had lost – in her other hand; blood drips onto her fingers, soaks her sweater. Greig’s lifeless body keels to the side, guided to collapse in a heap by Eve’s fist around the collar of his shirt. Villanelle blinks blood from her eyes as she sits up, panting, and she stares at Eve, breathless.

She’s never looked more beautiful.

Suddenly Eve is collapsing, her adrenaline taking a nose dive. She slumps to her knees, caught in Villanelle’s lap as fast arms encircle her waist, holding her steady, a grounding force in the madness and murder that surrounds them.

Their eyes meet and something primal inside Eve breaks, or maybe it clicks into place. Every moment between them, bloody and toxic and delicious, had been leading them here, racing them to the cliff’s edge, and Eve knows now, that it would have been as unavoidable as anything else.

Her blood is rushing through her, fast and violent and _alive_ , so when her mouth comes crashing down to meet Villanelle’s, it’s as intoxicating and natural as would be fitting.

She tastes like blood, like pain, like every cup of coffee she’s ever had. She tastes like revolution. She tastes like damnation.

She tastes like everything.

Villanelle is first to break away, sighing shakily into the space between them, her eyes shining hard with the thrill and the confusion of it all. Eve chases, chases like she’s always done. Lets their noses brush. Cups her face and captures her top lip between hers, soft and hesitant as blood drips over her fingers.

Villanelle’s hands pull Eve closer then as she kisses her again, and she closes her eyes, letting out a sigh as their mouths slide apart once more, separated by the meeting point of their foreheads.

Eve doesn’t think she can speak, but she forces herself to try. “Are you okay?” she whispers tightly.

And really, that is the most _Eve_ thing she could have asked. Villanelle grins. “I am very much looking forward to a shower.”

Eve chokes on a laugh, realising properly then the wet crimson mess of her face. “Oh God, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, you were beautiful,” Villanelle rushes out, breathless again. “So beautiful.”

Eve sighs shakily, presses their foreheads together again as she tries to catch her breath.

Villanelle squeezes her hips. “Do you feel unwell?”

“No,” Eve admits quietly, looking almost surprised. “No, I actually–I feel okay. I’m okay.”

“You are more than okay, Eve Polastri,” Villanelle murmurs, smiling softly.

Eve feels heat prickle at her eyes, burning, watery. She wants to say something, say anything – perhaps is working up the nerve to kiss her again – but she doesn’t get the chance to.

The door to the cell opens with a thunk, causing both of their heads to snap around.

There, in the doorway, stands Carolyn, with Konstantin by her side.

“Well. A little messier than I’d been hoping for, ladies.”


	10. Arcane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot? Introspection? Fluff?

_arcane: [noun] – something secret, mysterious, understood only by a few_

The next ten seconds occur all at once.

In a flurry of movement, Villanelle is springing to her feet, sliding out from under Eve to grab the gun from Greig’s lifeless body.

She cocks it, raises it.

She aims straight for Carolyn.

“No!” Eve shrieks from the floor, scrambling to her feet, her voice trembling with hysteria as Konstantin lunges forward, thrusting his hands out in a firm attempt to leash the women back into order. 

“ _You_ did this,” Villanelle spits at Carolyn, her chest heaving, her eyes blazing with a fury that’s taken hold astronomically fast. The gun is perfect in her hand. “ _You_ made me kill Peel.”

“ _Hardly_ ,” Carolyn scoffs. “You made that decision all by yourself.”

Villanelle growls, stepping forward with the gun. “Like _Hell_ I did!”

“Come now, Oksana–”

“You sold us out!”

“ _ENOUGH_ ,” Konstantin bellows, holding out his hand to command calm between the two women. He stares hard at Villanelle, his eyes communicating a whole lot more than he’s able to voice. “Villanelle, put the gun down.”

Villanelle doesn’t, steels her face and her hand through the pounding in her ears and the phantom burn of Eve’s lips on hers.

“ _Now_ , Villanelle.”

Villanelle snarls through her teeth, her anger rising, rising, rising –only to dissipate, almost all at once, as Eve’s hands slide gently around her forearms.

“Hey,” Eve whispers beside her shoulder, a cooling effect on the fiery rage inside her. “Put it down.”

Villanelle turns her head towards her, her hand growing numb. “But she deserves it,” she protests categorically, shaking her head in disbelief that her mind could tell her one thing but be superseded by Eve’s affirmation of the opposite. It’s confusing, makes her a little dizzy.

Memories of Rome come flooding back to Eve, when she had been the one staring down the barrel. Had _she_ deserved it? The idea leaves her mouth sour — she swallows against it.

“I know,” Eve nods, ignoring the way Carolyn and Konstantin exchange quizzical glances as she steps closer into Villanelle’s side, coming almost flush against her. “I know you’re angry, I am too. But we’re smarter than this. _You’re_ smarter.”

Villanelle ponders this for a moment, her eyes growing softer as she takes in Eve’s face. She breathes slowly, wrestling with herself, and when she finally lowers the gun, Eve can’t help but squeeze her arms gently in what she can only imagine is pride.

“Excellent,” Carolyn says with a nod, entirely unaffected by the reality of staring down the business end of a pistol.

“Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, we really ought to be taking our leave.”

Eve grips Villanelle hard, lest she take the gun and shoot her herself. Carolyn’s facial expression is, in this moment, nothing short of derisive. It leaves her with an anger, a venom that burns the blood in her, turning it dangerous.

It’s for this very reason that she finds herself saying “no”.

Both Carolyn and Konstantin blink at her, then at each other. But Eve, out of her peripheral, can see the smirk tugging at Villanelle’s soft, tantalising mouth, and the lurch it causes in her stomach is catalyst enough to her poison.

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Eve says, her voice low and hard as she steps forward, releasing Villanelle in order to fold her arms defensively across her blood-stained chest. “You’ve done nothing but lie to us and manipulate us into doing your dirty work for you.”

“Oh, please, it’s nothing Villanelle wouldn’t have done herself.”

“I don’t like when people orchestrate me,” Villanelle says lowly, her voice sharp with threat.

“Don’t think of it as an orchestration,” Carolyn suggests. “Think of it as a nudge in your usual direction.”

“That doesn’t hold much water when you’re actively forcing her in the exact opposite fucking direction,” Eve snaps. “You’d better start giving us some answers, Carolyn, I swear to _God_.”

“Answers?”

Her deliberate attempt at obtusity is plainly obvious and can only be intended to infuriate Eve and Villanelle alike. Both women rage low in their throat, but while Villanelle opts to sigh quite dramatically, Eve finds herself breaking.

“Yes, answers! Like what the Hell you’re doing here, for a start! How did you know we’d be here!? I mean, are you following us!? Did you somehow plan this whole thing, too!? Who even _are_ you, Carolyn!? Because I seriously doubt that you’re not involved in all of this in some way!”

And perhaps Eve has underestimated her own anger. It is certainly not a new feeling for her, but this experience of it is intensely beyond her own perceived limits; thrums violently inside her, almost tangible. The room is wet and smells of her crimes, and she’s never felt so claustrophobic and irrevocably furious before in her life. The only other time that even compares was in the middle of Berlin, in a nightclub where her best friend had slumped dead in a throng of dancers and strobe-lights, just beyond her reach.

Eve pushes this thought from her mind – her brain is tricking her, refusing to reconcile Bill’s death and Villanelle’s perpetration of it. It turns her stomach, and she knows that accepting Villanelle as Bill’s murderer would surely cause Eve to finish what she’d started in Paris months ago.

One thing at a time, she rationalises. Her feelings would have to wait.

Just behind Eve, Villanelle has folded her arms, is pouting petulantly at Konstantin. Her eyes are dark, mitigate her child-like stance – she’s angry, too, Eve can tell.

“You told me no more lies,” Villanelle huffs accusingly.

“I did not lie,” Konstantin defends, pointing a finger at her. “ _You_ did. This doesn’t much _look_ like the Dutch adviser’s house.”

“I followed him!” Villanelle exclaims, eyes wide. “How was I supposed to know he wouldn’t go home!?”

Carolyn signs then – the kind of sigh that halts conversation dead – and turns to Konstantin, adjusting her handbag on her shoulder.It’s a Valentino shopper bag, carmine red – Villanelle eyes it as Carolyn’s hand clasps over one of its edges.

“Perhaps we should move this conversation elsewhere,” Carolyn recommends.

“Are you even _listening_ to me?” Eve balks, throwing her hands out in frustration. “We’re going nowhere!”

“Really, Eve?” Carolyn sighs again. “If you are so desperate for answers, then I shall endeavour to answer them. But it’s a discussion that you’d rather be clean and comfortable for, trust me.”

Villanelle barks out a laugh at that, her shoulders shaking with restraint. “ _Trust_ you?”

“I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you,” Eve adds, tone biting.

At this, Carolyn looks truly disappointed in both of them, like they’ve completely fallen short of her expectations. “What on Earth has trust got to do with anything? Don’t forget, Eve, that I saved your life. You would’ve died in Rome if it hadn’t been for me.”

Eve’s wound twinges with the memory – she snaps through it. “Yeah, your plan was really _perfect_! I was _completely_ safe from the Twelve!”

“If I may defend myself, not once did I tell you to get on a plane and chase an ex-employee of theirs down so you could live happily ever after.”

Eve feels her cheeks flare brightly, colourful with an eclectic mix of anger and embarrassment. She balls her hands into tight, bone-white fists, ignores how they spasm.

“You tossed me away,” she growls.

“That’s the problem, I suppose,” Carolyn hums, her mouth twitching into what is almost a smile, sympathetic in its mockery of her. “Always someone else’s fault.”

Eve stops at that, her words falling short. Beside her, Villanelle has also gone quiet, and the silence causes Eve’s mind to fill with the whispers of people she’s known throughout her life; friends and ex-lovers, her parents, even her husband. Their judgements silent, hiding just out of sight but plain as day on their faces.

Does everyone feel this way?

“Can we do this later?” Konstantin hisses under his breath. “We are standing in a crime scene.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Eve growls at Carolyn, ignoring Konstantin’s efforts to move on. “Neither of us do.”

“Maybe not. But perhaps you owe it to yourselves to do the clever thing and come with us. It’s either that or wait for the rest of the Twelve to catch up to you. And like you said, Eve — both of you are smarter than that.”

Eve swallows, hard. Her pride might be the bitterest pill. She turns to Villanelle, manages to avoid the allure of her mouth long enough to meet her gaze in a silent plea that she might have their next move already decided.

Villanelle holds her gaze for a minute, thinking. Then, she steps forward with a sigh, looking between Carolyn and Konstantin. “Let’s go.”

Konstantin nods in her direction, pleased, as Carolyn hums approvingly and heads for the door. Over her shoulder, Villanelle motions to Eve, tilting her head encouragingly.

Eve is hesitant, can’t quite believe Villanelle is going along with this, but the smile that suddenly warms the younger woman’s face is more assuring to Eve than words could ever be.

So, she follows. There is a boat outside waiting for them, presumably the one Konstantin and Carolyn had arrived in; while Carolyn steps carefully in with Konstantin’s hand to guide her, Villanelle clambers in with all the grace of a rock climber, securing the seat next to Konstantin towards the stern. Eve sits at the bow with Carolyn, eyes fixed on the water as she tries desperately not to throw up. She closes her eyes as Konstantin rows them down the river, and prays for dry land and a warm bed to disappear into.

Behind her, Villanelle is grumbling, nudging her shoulder to Konstantin’s.

“Can I row?” she asks.

“No.”

She huffs, rolling her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she mumbles petulantly. “I had it under control.”

Konstantin laughs, his fingers flexing around the oar as he rows. “Ah, you were planning to be caught, yes?”

“Maybe,” Villanelle scowls.

Konstantin smiles, pats her back with his free hand. “You did a good job.”

“I know,” Villanelle says with a shrug. “They were very stupid to go against me.”

“And Eve?” he asks quietly, with a tilt of his head.

“Yes,” Villanelle nods, a real smile quirking at her mouth as she looks forward into Eve’s gorgeous hair, remembering with awe the way she’d killed, the way she’d kissed. “Eve, too.”

They are on a British private jet less than two hours later, Canada-bound. “Konstantin is living there,” Villanelle explains to Eve as they board. “In Whitehorse.”

“Villanelle has been staying with me,” Konstantin adds, letting Carolyn lead them to the cabin. Once inside, he points to the far end of the plane, to the little door by the refreshments area. “There are towels in the bathroom for you both to clean up, and some clothes.”

Eve is only half-listening, caught in the sinking feeling in her chest as she looks at Villanelle. “Canada, huh?” she murmurs, her tone too defeated to be considered accusatory.

Villanelle furrows her brow for a second, seemingly oblivious to why Eve suddenly seems so disappointed. “For a few weeks, yes,” she shrugs. “Alaska was boring on my own.”

Eve swallows and nods, tries not to be overwhelmed by the realisation that even if she’d never been kidnapped, she still wouldn’t have found her. She’d been too late – Villanelle had already gone. She makes her way to the bathroom at the back of the cabin and washes quickly, runs a wet towel over her face and arms and removes her sticky shirt. The sink is splattered, red streaks on white porcelain; she uses the shirt to wipe it down, then throws it into the bin by her feet.

On the rail above her head hangs a black hoodie, just about the right fit; Eve zips herself into it, deciding not to question why it had been waiting for her. Her mind has capacity enough only for what Carolyn has to say next, and what she’s been able to determine so far:

She’d been in Amsterdam. So had Villanelle. Villanelle had been in Alaska, then somehow ended up in Canada with Konstantin. She’d come to Amsterdam, presumably a few days ago, and followed a Dutch adviser to Giethoorn village, putting her right back into Eve’s path, however inadvertently.

And, crucially, this was all to do with the Twelve. Of which Eve and Villanelle had murdered several members, not three hours ago.

In the cabin, Eve stares at her hands for a few minutes while Villanelle cleans up – she is seated across from Carolyn and Konstantin, knows that this is her opportunity for answers, to fill the gaps in the story that she’s been struggling to reconcile for so long. She works to see the facts in her head, the timeline, the dates, the places, eager to be as clever as possible in the questions she will ask.

What does she want to know, really? What answers lie at the heart of this whole thing?

Villanelle returns as the plane begins to taxi down the runway. She slumps into the seat beside Eve, not bothering with her seatbelt as she crosses her ankle over her knee. She also wears a hoodie, dark blue in colour; she has cleaned the gash on her jawline, and she has an icepack for the bruise around her eye.

She’s still, undoubtedly, breathtaking.

“So,” Villanelle sighs loudly, leaning back in the chair and nodding to Konstantin. “What are you doing here?”

“Carolyn called me, some days ago now,” Konstantin says. “She said that Eve had disappeared, so she needed my Russian connections to help find her.”

Villanelle raises an eyebrow. “What, MI6 don’t have enough resources at their disposal?”

“It’s a bit trickier to utilise those resources when the person you’re looking for is dead on public record,” Carolyn deadpans, smoothing down the material over her legs as she crosses them. “I wasn’t keen to upset the apple cart any further regarding this case.”

“Why bother looking for me at all, then?” Eve is incredulous. “And why bother sending Martin to my door to check up on me if you didn’t want to ‘upset the apple cart’?”

“Because, Eve,” Carolyn sighs, “despite what you may think, I’m not entirely heartless. You were a good employee, and our relationship, though strained in the end, had been built on respect. I didn’t want to see you struggle.”

“So you spied on me?”

“It’s quite literally in my job description,” Carolyn defends. “Besides, I would say it’s a good thing that I did. When we saw you’d left, I got in touch with Konstantin to track you down.”

“My contacts traced you here,” Konstantin carries on. “In Amsterdam. Apparently, one of the Twelve had been on another contract kill when they’d spotted you in Anchorage.”

“So, what, you came to rescue me?” Eve frowns, looking between them. “Both of you?”

“Well, I figured _she_ would be here,” Konstantin says, looking at Villanelle with a frown. “You disappeared.”

“I always disappear,” Villanelle shrugs.

“You said you’d be back already. My wife is worried.”

Villanelle blinks. “Oh.”

Eve’s brow furrows, and she looks at Villanelle for a brief second. There is confusion there, an uncertain twitch, but there is warmth in her cheeks, like she might be touched that somebody is concerned for her.

Eve banks this for later, more curious than ever to find out what Villanelle has been doing in Canada these past few weeks.

“As for me,” Carolyn continues, levelling Eve with a somewhat blank look, “I thought it best to attend in person. In case a negotiation was necessary. Although, apparently, it was not.”

Eve frowns at that, confused. “Why would you think the Twelve would negotiate with MI6?” A beat, in which she sighs impatiently. “They’re an organised crime syndicate, what reason would they possibly have…”

She trails off then, as the plane lifts off the ground and rises into the sky, leaving Amsterdam behind. Words are unnecessary, and she exhales shakily as the penny finally drops.

Beside her, Villanelle has shifted. She’s leaning forward now, hands clasped loosely together as she stares at Carolyn, hard. Her face is set in stone, caught somewhere between anger and disbelief.

“You,” she laughs bitterly, jabbing her thumbs in Carolyn’s direction. “ _You_ are working for them.”

Carolyn doesn’t even flinch. “In a way.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re in charge,” Eve declares, voice trembling as the pieces finally come together in her mind, quickly and only somewhat disjointed, clear enough that she is confident she’s figured it out. “This whole time, you’ve been running everything.”

“Not entirely,” Carolyn says with a wry, knowing smile; the sort of smile one wears when they wield the power of a great secret. “But yes, I am very much a part of the organisation.”

Eve blows out a breath, shaking her head, almost laughing at the absurdity of it all. “This is fucking ridiculous.”

“We do what we have to, Eve,” Carolyn defends, indignantly. “This wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly. I did it for MI6 and the security of Europe. A preventative measure. The Twelve were nothing more than terrorists before – with MI6’s intelligence they have become more refined, more discreet, more readily controlled.”

“They _murder_ people.”

“Safety is costly, Eve,” Carolyn says. “I would’ve thought you knew that by now.”

“You’ve been investigating them!”

A flourish of the hand. “Appearances are important. Power and control, and all that.”

Villanelle scoffs. “The Twelve are not readily controlled,” she argues sharply. “They would not hesitate to blow MI6 to Hell.”

“It’s been a delicate alliance, yes. Made more difficult by recent events.”

“There have been rumours, since Rome,” Konstantin pipes up, “that their leadership has become compromised. Become so weak that a rogue assassin and a rival agent had managed to kill one of their best men.”

Villanelle shrugs. “He wanted to kill us first.”

“Semantics,” Konstantin grumbles. “Because of you two, everything has had to change.”

“Look at that,” Villanelle murmurs over to Eve, grinning wickedly. “We started a revolution.”

Eve rolls her eyes briefly, fights off the excitement that flickers and dies in her stomach at that, to press forward with more serious matters. “So what happens now?”

“It is my hope that we can start afresh,” Carolyn replies. “See to it that someone far more manageable is in control of the Twelve from now on.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Villanelle suggests, raising an eyebrow in Carolyn’s direction.

“Oh I think not. I have hobbies.”

“Then what is your role, exactly?” Eve asks, voice hard with demand as her head starts to spin.

“Put simply, I suppose you might call me a recruiter.”

“Like you?” Villanelle balks, looking at Konstantin.

“Not quite,” Carolyn says. “Konstantin recruits assassins, such as Villanelle. My job is to look for the Konstantins.”

“The handlers?”

“Precisely,” Carolyn says, looking straight at Eve. “The handlers.”

Eve swallows hard, her neck prickling with heat as the hairs there stand on end.

A lot of things make more sense to her now – hiring her onto Villanelle’s case, encouraging them to work together, even getting Dr Martin to visit her in Watford. Has Carolyn been grooming her this whole time? Testing her by getting her to manage Villanelle during Operation Mandalay?

Was this what all of this had been leading to? Eve becoming a handler for the Twelve? And had that all gone to shit the second Eve had left Hugo for Villanelle in Rome?

Villanelle sees the look that passes between Eve and Carolyn then, frowns as pieces of the puzzle start to come together in her head. She knows without evidence that her mind must mirror Eve’s in this moment, as they both take this step toward answers together.

Eve looks positively sick – the sight is uncomfortable, so Villanelle shoots Konstantin a deliberate look, silently communicating her desire for the discussion to stop at this point, until Eve is less pale.

He understands, clears his throat accordingly. “You rest now,” Konstantin tells them both, shooting Eve a small, sympathetic smile as she visibly deflates in her seat, relieved. “Plenty of time to talk things over when we’re on the ground.”

“Of course,” Carolyn agrees.

Some time later, Carolyn unclips her seatbelt and stands, excusing herself and heading towards the bathroom. Konstantin has fallen asleep across from Villanelle, is snoring quietly with his head resting against his propped-up fist. It’s in this quiet moment that Villanelle turns to Eve, who has been staring out of the window ever since the conversation had died down.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Are you awake?”

Eve simply hums in response, eyes remaining fixed on the sky as it swims outside.

“Did you get the answers you were looking for?”

Eve sighs at that, closes her eyes. “I don’t know what answers I was looking for.”

“Mm,” Villanelle hums. “But you know more now.”

“Sure.” A beat, and then Eve frowns, turning to face Villanelle properly. “Why do you think the Twelve wanted me to kill you?”

Villanelle’s head snaps around at that, her interest renewed. “You can’t guess?”

“To toy with me, yeah. It just–seems weird to me.”

“Which part, exactly?”

“That they’d be so sure that I would do it,” Eve admits, somewhat quietly. “I had come looking for you, after all.”

Villanelle shrugs. “Yes, but we fought. They thought you hated me, especially after what I said.”

Eve’s frown grows deeper. “How would they have known what you said?”

At that, Villanelle narrows an eyebrow, confused. “The room was bugged, Eve. Didn’t you know that?”

Eve balks. “ _How_ would I have known that?”

“You were MI6, Eve. And MI5. There were two cameras in the corner of the room.”

Well, shit. Eve _hadn’t_ noticed that. Another mystery solved. But, she realises, if that is true…

Suddenly something new is warming inside her; something unsure, something hopeful. “Wait, so…all those things you said–”

“Was for their benefit, yes,” Villanelle shrugs.

It floods over Eve, then – relief, and validation. “You knew they’d make me do it,” Eve breathes out. “You wanted it to be believable.”

“Of course. They are not exhibitionists or artists, Eve, not like me. The whole point of the Twelve is getting people to do their dirty work for them, after all.”

“So you didn’t mean it? When you said all that stuff about moving on?”

Villanelle’s eyes flick down to her hands then. “I meant that. I really _should_ move on.”

Eve swallows hard, her heart beating loud in her ears. “Will you?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Why?”

Villanelle, at this, simply smiles; shy, reserved, but undoubtedly certain. “What would I be moving onto, Eve? There’s only you.”

Villanelle is first through the door to Konstantin’s lakehouse, and Eve is given a small insight into how she’s been living almost immediately.

The door opens into the kitchen, where a stocky, relatively short woman stands at the stove, stirring and seasoning between three bubbling pots. Her head snaps up as they enter – three sets of feet, as Carolyn has opted for a hotel – and through her faded strawberry blonde curls, Eve can see the way the woman’s face seems to light up in horror and relief all at once.

“Heavens above!” the woman gasps, abandoning the stove to rush over. Eve expects she will make for Konstantin, for surely this is his wife, Yelena, and surely she’s been missing her husband.

She’s more than a little surprised when she reaches for Villanelle first, pinching her chin to inspect her bruised eye and wounded jaw.

“What kind of trouble caused this, mm!?” She tuts disapprovingly, brow knitted in concern as she touches her free thumb lightly to Villanelle’s eye.

“I’m fine,” Villanelle grumbles, wincing as her chin is released but managing a wicked grin in spite of herself. “You should see the other guys.”

Yelena sighs at that, rolling her eyes. “Enough of that. You’re okay, yes?”

“Yes,” Villanelle says. She then turns to a stunned Eve. “This is Eve,” she says softly, turning back to Yelena. “She helped me.”

Yelena frowns, concerned. “Eve?” She whispers, eyes flicking between Villanelle’s and the woman in question’s.

“It’s okay,” Villanelle assures her with a hand on her shoulder. “We are okay.”

Yelena then turns to Eve, who stands awkwardly. “Hi,” Eve tries, clearing her throat. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Yelena seems to consider her for a few seconds. Then, she smiles, and just like that, any reservations her face had been hinting at are gone. “Welcome, Eve. I hope you’re hungry.”

“ _I_ definitely am,” Konstantin chirps, pressing an affectionate kiss to his wife’s cheek as he passes her, heading towards the living room. “Where is Irina?”

“In the garden!” Yelena calls through to him, before turning back to Villanelle. “You make sure our guest gets settled upstairs, Oksana. Dinner is soon.”

Villanelle hums agreeably. Eve’s jaw nearly hits the floor.

What the fuck kind of parallel universe had she just stepped foot into?

Villanelle leads Eve through the house and up the stairs, pointing out the bathroom and bedrooms as she goes until finally shuffling into the room at the far end of the landing. It’s nothing remarkable; there is a double bed on the far wall, accented by two white bedside units; the wardrobe is in the corner of the room, mirrored and fitted, and a large window overlooks the back garden as it backs onto a lake.

But for all its minimalism, there are little tokens of style everywhere. Eve notices that the curtains and the lampshade are blush-coloured crushed velvet; the bedsheets are made of fine grey silk, and there are several perfume bottles and items of make-up on the bedside table closest to the door on the left side. The wardrobe, slightly ajar, plays host to a number of colourful items – Eve is sure she sees stripes, sequins, even fur, in a range of flattering colours

Villanelle is everywhere in this room, Eve realises even before the lingering scent of French jasmine becomes apparent.

Suddenly, it feels like Paris all over again. It makes Eve’s stomach hurt, the memory raw, as though it only happened yesterday.

“You can borrow some things of mine to wear,” Villanelle offers, nodding her head to the wardrobe. “My most dull clothes are on the right.”

‘Dull’ for Villanelle is still fashionable – Eve is silent as she palms her way through the wardrobe, trying to ignore the burn of Villanelle’s eyes on her back as she picks out a soft black t-shirt and some grey bottoms. It feels like she’s on trial, being scrutinised for her choices both here and everywhere else, and she finds herself holding her breath until she’s sure the other woman is no longer looking at her.

The room is hot, all of a sudden, and a lot smaller. Is this what it feels like when the walls close in?

Clearing her throat, she croaks through her discomfort as Villanelle shuffles around behind her. “So, uh, I can sleep on the couch downstairs.”

The shuffling stops. Villanelle is quiet for a few seconds – Eve can imagine the way she’s faltering, the confused knitting of her brow, but Eve can’t bring herself to face her head on, to see it for herself.

Eventually, after a long moment, the tension breaks. “If you’re sure,” Villanelle hums, the pitch just high enough that Eve can tell she’s holding something back.

Eve understands, she thinks. After all, _she_ had been the one to bridge the gap between them; had let herself go and kissed her harder than she’s ever kissed anyone before. It lingers in her mouth; the taste of her lips, the feel of her tongue – even now, her hips remember the shape of the hands that had grasped at them.

But to share a bed with her? To lie beside her like she’d done in Paris, not with the intent to kill but simply just to be? To allow herself to breathe in the presence of her soft heat, to feel safe when her back is turned?

It’s a step over a line that her brain won’t let her cross, much as her mouth and hands may act in opposition, in this ongoing internal conflict that threatens to destroy her.

“Why don’t you go help in the kitchen?” Eve suggests in a quick breath, blinking several times to quell the tears that suddenly press behind her eyes. “I’m just going to change.”

It’s not rude, per se, but it’s a clear brush-off, and though Eve refuses to observe the way Villanelle’s face has fallen, she doesn’t need to, for she feels the sting of her own words far too physically in the way her blood runs cold.

There is some shuffling again, and Eve hears the door close behind Villanelle as she retreats from the room, without a word. In the immediate second after she’s gone, Eve sighs out shakily, closing her eyes and letting her head hang low. In doing so, her nose brushes the clothes in her hands – predictably, a familiar perfume lingers there, presumably from the last time they’d been worn.

In spite of herself, Eve breathes in, fills her lungs, and holds there until she’s lightheaded.

Dinner is, unsurprisingly, an awkward affair.

Yelena, by all accounts, is a wonderful cook. She has made a simple spaghetti in a rich tomato sauce, topped off with basil leaves and served with warm bread and a mixed salad platter for the table. When Eve is making her way downstairs, she hears chatter coming from the dining room, and spies briefly through the doorway. She sees Konstantin pouring wine into his glass and pointing a disapproving finger at Irina when she tries to take a swig. Irina grumbles her disappointment, and Eve can hear Villanelle laughing as she makes fun of her. To anyone on the outside looking in, they would seem like the perfect little family unit. It might explain why Eve almost feels like she’s walked into some weird ‘meet the parents’ type fever dream.

At the table, Eve finds herself seated next to Irina, who is across from Villanelle. The young girl is exactly as Eve remembers – chatty, clever and absurdly audacious, lacking the filter gained with adulthood to know when to stop asking questions.

Villanelle, apparently, has been talking.

“You’re the one she shot?” Irina asks Eve between mouthfuls of bread.

Eve sighs. _Fuck my life._ “That’s me.”

“She was right – your hair is big.”

“Thanks, kid.”

“Are you two dating?”

Eve nearly drops her fork at that. Konstantin groans into his drink, and Villanelle snaps her head up from her plate to glare at Irina across the table. “Shut your face.”

“Why!? It’s just a question!”

“Eat your food, Irina,” Yelena says sternly, shooting Eve an apologetic look. “Are you enjoying it, Eve?”

“It’s lovely,” Eve assures her with a forced smile, feeling her appetite slowly ebb away from her.

Irina huffs loudly, twirls her fork in a mound of spaghetti. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Villanelle’s fork clatters to the table then as she growls. “You are a little shit.”

“You are the shit!”

“ _HEY–!_ ”

“Okay!” Konstantin cuts in firmly. “Girls, no fighting at the dinner table!”

Both Irina and Villanelle lean back in their seats at that, scowling at one another like two quarrelling sisters. In this moment Eve thinks of Carolyn, probably enjoying room service in the quiet solace of a fancy hotel, and concludes that she’s never been more jealous in all her life.

There follows a few moments of silence in which Eve manages two forkfuls of spaghetti and a large mouthful of wine, and she thinks to herself _it is almost over_ , she has almost made it, and she has almost convinced herself of this mantra when Irina poses the question to end all questions:

“Are you in love?”

The silence that follows is devastatingly palpable. Eve feels her cheeks burn bright red, has to stare at her plate to control her breathing as her heart starts to race in her chest. Out of her peripheral, she spots Konstantin and Yelena glancing at one another. She wants to avoid eye contact with anyone, especially Villanelle, but she can’t help herself.

When she looks up, Villanelle is already looking back at her. Her smile is chilling, and utterly, utterly empty. “I don’t know what that is,” she tells Irina calmly, taking a drink from her glass, effectively stopping the conversation dead.

Eve sees it for what it is – payback, for upstairs. It’s both a colossal relief and agonisingly torturous.

Afterwards, Eve and Irina do the dishes in relative silence – Eve suspects that Yelena has bent Irina’s ear privately over her behaviour at dinner. Villanelle disappears upstairs almost immediately once the table is cleared, giving Eve more than enough time to help herself to the Vasilievs’ generously-stocked liquor cabinet. Having had two glasses of red with dinner, she has a light buzz going, and although normally it requires a rather copious amount of alcohol for her to slur her words, the effects seem to take hold pretty quickly after bottle number one. She supposes it may be down to the events of the day, what she’d seen and done, the way her adrenaline had dipped and skyrocketed.

Eve sits alone in the living room for a bit, the wine guiding her into troubled reflection. She thinks of the compound; how she’d seen Greig on top of Villanelle, about to hurt her. Oh, how angry Eve had been in that moment, so angry that she hadn’t even thought twice about slitting his throat. Why had she done that, specifically, she wonders? Why hadn’t she just stabbed him in the back? Would she even have been strong enough for that? Why had slicing his throat been her knee-jerk reaction?

These questions swirl in the soup of her mind, steaming and incoherent, and it isn’t until she recalls Villanelle changing on the plane, that her brain begins to cool. She had removed her shirt just out of sight, but Eve had glanced briefly and been shocked by what she’d seen. Her body had been badly bruised, purple in patches over her ribs and fingerprints around her arm where she’d been grabbed, and as Eve remembers the image of it, she is furiously overwhelmed with a sense of justification.

Greig had gotten what he deserved.

It is with this thought that Eve wills herself to her feet, and climbs the stairs.

Eve finds Villanelle scribbling, in a notebook on her bed, what looks to be a mountain range. It’s rather good, unsurprisingly. Villanelle looks up only briefly as Eve enters, before allowing her eyes to return to what she’s doing, her face giving nothing away as to what she may be thinking.

Eve takes this moment to really look at her. Her honey-blonde hair falls in waves around her shoulders, tucked behind one ear to reveal the sharpness of her jawline, the slope of her nose, the soft glow of her skin by the bedside lamp. She’s changed her clothes since dinner, too – her sweater is pink, the colour of raspberries, and it slips off one shoulder as she draws, her pencil scratching over the page between long fingers. Her legs are outstretched, clad in white sleep shorts until just above her knees; her skin is smooth and her toenails match the bedsheets.

She truly is beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful thing Eve has ever seen. Standing here now, Eve is overcome with the presence of her – her beauty, her elegance, the way she can make Eve question everything she’s ever known without even saying a word.

Maybe it’s a culmination of the events that have led them here, and maybe it’s the wine coursing through her, but Eve can sense the exact moment her body disassociates from her brain, can feel within herself the exact moment she decides that her curiosity has finally gotten the best of her, regardless of whatever consequences may await.

She doesn’t care for the rules anymore, as she pads surely into the room and climbs onto the bed, straddling Villanelle over the drawing she’s been working on.

Villanelle’s eyes go wide, amused. “Oh, hello,” she quips jovially, grinning as she sets her pad and pencils to one side in favour of holding onto Eve’s hips with both hands.

“Are you ever not annoying?” Eve sighs frustratedly, rolling her hips forward and closing her eyes as the feel of Villanelle’s stomach through her sweater becomes more apparent.

“No.”

Eve is captured by the glint in her eyes then, subsequently detaches further from reason. But when she leans in to kiss her, Villanelle turns her head.

Eve just giggles against her cheek. “ _Come onnnn_ ,” she whispers, only slightly petulant. “You know this is where we’ve been headed.”

“You are right.”

“So kiss me,” Eve murmurs, half-moaning as she rolls her hips again, her head growing fuzzy. “Touch me.”

Villanelle exhales slowly, squeezes Eve’s hips. “You are drunk,” she frowns.

“So?” Eve murmurs against her jaw, her lips ghosting over chin, her neck.

“So you will regret it in the morning.”

Eve snorts. “And I wouldn’t if I were sober?”

Villanelle growls low in her throat at that, and suddenly she’s moving.

Eve gasps as she’s pinned onto her back on the bed, blinks away the bleariness in her eyes and looks up at Villanelle through hooded lids as her stomach coils in excitement. “Shit, okay, this way works too.”

“Not happening,” Villanelle says firmly.

“Could’ve fooled me,” Eve snorts, unable to stop herself from bursting out in laughter.

Villanelle rolls her eyes and makes to get up, but Eve whines loudly, holds onto her shoulders through her sweater. “No no no, come on, I was joking! Can’t you just…”

Villanelle raises an eyebrow as Eve trails off. “Just…?”

Eve sighs, pouting. “Just – kiss me, for a while?”

Villanelle smiles softly at that, seems to consider this for a few seconds before reaching down to cup Eve’s cheek.

“Say please,” she says.

Eve grumbles and grabs Villanelle’s wrist, squeezing it hard. “Don’t be a dick.”

“Manners are important, Eve.”

“You are literally a murderer.”

“I can still be polite.”

A thought occurs to Eve then, in the haze of her mind. “Are you punishing me?” she murmurs, leaning up to ghost her mouth along Villanelle’s chin and _god_ , the smell of her – it really is no wonder she’d chased that scent around the world. “Is that what this is?”

“Do you deserve to be punished?” Villanelle asks, cocking her head to the side and staring down at her. The look in her eyes is wicked then, dark. Eve shudders under her, now undoubtedly aching between her thighs.

“Maybe,” Eve whispers, eyes fluttering closed as she presses her forehead to Villanelle’s throat. “Probably.”

Villanelle tangles her fingers in Eve’s hair then, gently guides her heavy head back onto the bed. “Self-pity does not suit you,” she says, somewhat sympathetically – or, at least, as far as she’s able to manage. “We can’t have sex like this.”

“Who cares _how_ we have sex?” Eve sighs sharply.

“ _I_ do,” Villanelle says firmly, eyes going hard for a moment.

Eve falters, blinks a few times to regain her composure. “Oh,” she murmurs, and before Villanelle can try to leave again, Eve is wrapping her arms around her shoulders, nudging their foreheads together, a quiet, intimate moment that she hopes will convey the guilt suddenly gnawing at her stomach.

“Then just kiss me,” Eve whispers, and then, after a beat, adds “please.”

Villanelle smiles at that, and it’s so refreshingly sincere that Eve’s chest momentarily constricts at the sight of it. When Villanelle ducks her head, Eve leans up to meet her in a soft, unrelenting kiss, arguably the truest and most honest thing they’ve shared up to this point.

Eve stays in that moment until she can no longer, murmurs incoherently as exhaustion starts to seep into her bones, clawing at her eyes. She feels Villanelle peck her lips once, twice, three times more, tries to reciprocate but can already feel the edges of her eyes growing dark.

As Eve finally falls asleep after their traumatic day, she feels movement along her side, warm and reassuring, and hears quiet words of comfort whispered into her hair, sealed with a soft kiss that promises more than words could ever say, left for tomorrow.


	11. Kalopsia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> peep the tag 'angst', folks

_kalopsia: [noun] — the delusion of things being more beautiful than they really are_

Waking up beside Eve is, in a word, beautiful. Villanelle should know – her appreciation of such things is down to a fine art.

Last night had been an exercise in restraint on her part, as well as a great test of her ability to follow complex emotion which, if she’s honest, she isn’t entirely sure she passed. Eve had been highly emotional and to varying degrees, and while Villanelle cannot claim to understand the depth of most of what Eve had been feeling, what she can be certain of is that she herself had absolutely done the right thing in the end.

To feel Eve’s hands on her, to feel her mouth and her hips, to be so close, had been everything Villanelle had imagined, and if she’d been a lesser woman or a man she would’ve succumbed to Eve’s seduction, given herself over to the moment that has been building between them for so long.

But Villanelle considers herself to be a generous mix of extremely logical and somewhat chivalrous. She may not be a patient personality by any means, but she knows that the short term has consequences for the future, and she knows that if she and Eve are to stand a chance, she must commit herself to the long game. And that’s okay, she thinks, because it will be worth it in the end. It will all be worth it.

Still, the present is nice, warm and beautiful. Eve sleeps with her back to her, her wild curls fanned out on the pillow below her head; Villanelle closes her eyes to immerse herself in the smell of them, and keeps her close with an arm around her waist, breathing evenly for the first time in weeks.

It’s not Alaska, but it’s better, somehow. They’ve never been closer.

They’re close enough that Villanelle feels, in the slight shift of her hips and the rise of her stomach, the exact moment that Eve awakens. She observes the way she comes to – it’s gradual, lazy. She looks like a baby just born. She doesn’t scream, however, or cry. In fact, she doesn’t do anything. Eve’s eyelids flutter open and she blinks, several times, before finally focusing all of her attention on the wall straight ahead. She looks like she’s thinking.

Villanelle wonders _what_ she’s thinking. What is that on her face? She seems disconnected from herself, very far away from the bed in which she lies, in Villanelle’s arms. Is she sleepy? Did she sleep well? Is she still drunk, or is this her hangover quietly manifesting itself?

Villanelle considers all of these, thinks proudly to herself that yes, the quest for knowledge is very much a mutual thing between them. She wants to know everything, too.

Then again, maybe ‘everything’ is overrated. Because Villanelle can see the exact moment when clarity washes over Eve’s face; the paling, the twitching, the short exhalation of breath. She feels Eve’s body tense under her touch, and _oh_.

It’s not exhaustion, or a hangover, Villanelle realises. It’s regret.

But no, how can it be? She’d done everything right.

Villanelle refuses to accept it. She tries, cooly, whispers a soft “hello” against Eve’s shoulder, and holds her breath.

Eve’s neck twitches as she swallows. “Hi,” she croaks back, voice thick with sleep and something else that Villanelle cannot understand, no matter how much she wants to.

Instead, she holds tight to the way Eve feels, how warm she is. It’s not a brush-off, not really. With this in mind, she tries again: “Did you sleep well?”

“I…” but Eve trails off, leaves Villanelle chasing down a dead end. _What_ , she’s desperate to ask her, _tell me, tell me anything, tell me everything._

“I have a headache,” she finally murmurs, lowly, and when she shuffles forwards slightly, Villanelle is struck by the sudden cold that seeps into the space between their bodies.

“I can get you some aspirin,” Villanelle suggests softly, a last-ditch attempt because she knows, deep down, knows she’s pulling away, she’s shutting down, and she hopes her voice doesn’t betray her but goddamnit it wasn’t supposed to be like this–

“I need to use the bathroom,” rushes out from Eve in a shallow breath, biting in its wake. Just like that, Eve is gone, rising from the bed and padding out of the room, and Villanelle knows that she will not be coming back.

With this thought, Villanelle deflates, sinking back into the sheets as they grow empty around her, her eyes shining with anger and confusion.

She’d done everything right. She’d been patient, she hadn’t pushed; she hadn’t taken advantage when she’d been given every opportunity to; yet still, it hadn’t been enough.

And maybe, for Eve, nothing ever will be.

Much of the day passes in a blur, and with time and conversations swirling endlessly around her, Eve thinks that this must be what it feels like to crash.

Waking up that morning, she’d initially been confused by the warm body beside her. The arm slung over her hips had been smooth, delicate, but it had held strong, hugged tight to Eve. The breath on her neck had been soft and sweet, and Eve had lain awake for several minutes, following the rise and fall of Villanelle’s chest against her back. It hadn’t been long before it had crept in, however – the persistent push-pull of her obsession, dragging her down from the height of her fascination to the pit of her revulsion.

She’d retreated; embarrassed, conflicted. She’d splashed cold water onto her face until she’d been able to see straight and then, through the dull ache of the hangover that clung to the back of her head, she’d made her way downstairs.

That had been hours ago. She’s spent some time alone in the living room since then, contemplating, mindful that she could be joined by any one of her inadvertent house mates at any given moment, including the woman she’d left in bed.

The thought sends a shiver through her. She’s glad she and Villanelle never had sex, is glad that Villanelle had been considerate enough in that moment to be the responsible one. Deep down, Eve appreciates it, but she daren’t linger for too long on that sentiment. It’ll just make things more complicated than they already are.

And, _God_ , how had life become so complicated?

She thinks a lot about the way things used to be. She thinks of the friends she used to have; neighbours whose cats she would feed if they went on holiday, people she’d smile at on the subway on her way to work. She thinks of Elena – wild, vibrant Elena, who’d had her pegged from the beginning – and hopes she’s found the fulfilling life she’d been looking for. She thinks of Kenny, how kind and clever he’d been, how utterly loyal he’d been only for her to let him down in the end.

And then, Bill. She’d failed him most of all. He’d had a life, a family, a daughter who needed him. But he’d been a good friend, the _best_ friend, so it hadn’t even been a question that yes, of course, he would follow Eve to Berlin while she chased down the woman who would eventually become his maker.

It’s clear in Eve’s mind that Bill is the root of everything wrong between her and Villanelle. She doesn’t think it’s something she’s ever going to be able to reconcile.

Maybe that’s why she’s so relieved that all they’d done last night was sleep.

She hasn’t, so much, been thinking about Niko, which serves as a great source of frustration. They had, after all, been married for ten years, so what the fuck is wrong with her that she hadn’t even so much as spared him a thought since that day in Carolyn’s townhouse? Surely it shouldn’t matter if their relationship had been beyond saving in the end. Shouldn’t she still care? Wouldn’t any decent human care?

He’d seen her true self that day – who is that, exactly? Where had that power, that confidence, come from? It had certainly felt right in the moment, but it’s a feeling that has eluded her ever since.

Well, no, not quite, she accepts. She’d felt it yesterday – in Amsterdam, with Villanelle, surrounded by bodies and blood and the feel of the other woman as she’d kissed her.

That feeling – it’s more than simply feeling alive. What it is, exactly, she doesn’t know, and that’s terrifying.

Oh, if Niko could see her now. If he could’ve seen her yesterday. And now, with Carolyn and all of these new questions and answers about the Twelve–

Eve just needs a break. She needs to sleep, alone, for a lot longer.

It’s three in the afternoon when she decides that what she really, truly needs, is a cigarette. Yelena has already left for the store, and with Konstantin out on business and Villanelle yet to emerge, Eve has no choice but to suffer in silence. It’s the first time that she’s considered the fact that she has no money she can access, along with no passport and no phone. She’s completely cut off.

The thought is mildly claustrophobia-inducing. She steps out into the garden for some air, breathes in lungfuls of it as it is swept in by the lake, salty and cool.

Irina is out here, too, tucked behind some bushes, like she’s hiding. She tries to disguise it, but it’s too late; Eve has already seen the plume of smoke dissipated by her hand, can see the square carton protruding awkwardly from her jacket pocket.

“Please don’t tell Mama,” Irina pleads, hiding her lit cigarette behind her back.

Eve sighs. “Kid–”

“She’d kill me!” And then, after a beat: “So would Elle!”

Eve’s stomach knots. _Elle_. “Is that so?”

“She hates it when I smoke,” Irina grumbles, scuffing her foot off the ground like a petulant child. “Even more than Mama does.”

Eve considers this, then sighs, holding out her hand. “Let me bum one and I won’t tell.”

Irina blinks, surprised, but happily hands one over in exchange for Eve’s silence on the matter.

“Aren’t you worried that Elle will be mad at you?” She asks, as Eve takes a long, long drag.

When Eve breathes out, smoke billows in the air around them, and her eyes flutter closed, relieved. “Not one bit.”

Dinner that evening is not held at the table, but rather in separate corners of the house – probably wise, following the awkwardness of the previous night. Villanelle and Irina eat in their respective rooms, while Eve opts for a TV dinner with Konstantin and Yelena. Konstantin spends a lot of the time grumbling at the screen, gesturing wildly in frustration whenever a contestant gets a question wrong, all the while Yelena simply shakes her head at him, smiling at his passion for the game.

It reminds Eve of how her parents had been once, many years ago, and through the wild applause and cheers onscreen, Eve’s mind drifts to thoughts of her mother.

She’d be in South Korea by this time of year, visiting with her sister and brother-in-law. Such a trip had become an annual undertaking the year after Eve’s father had died and Eve had made the decision to move back to London – her mother had always claimed it was just a “nice little family thing”, but Eve has long suspected that it was more a knee-jerk reaction due to the upset her moving away had caused. Ever since her father had died, her mother had been overly protective, eager and interested in even the most minute aspects of her daughter’s life, and Eve really doesn’t blame her for that. She understands, truly.

And maybe, if she’d known that this is how her life was going to play out, Eve would’ve been more appreciative. Would’ve called more.

A thought occurs to her then, one she can’t shake. For news of her death had spread swiftly through London, yes, and likely leaked into the edges of Europe, but how likely is it really that such news had reached South Korea?

She’d never have entertained the thought before, hyper-aware of the risk attached to such a move. But what does she have to lose now, really? It’s not like the Twelve will hunt her any faster.

 _Fuck it._ Eve remembers her mother’s phone number, dials it from the landline in the Vasilievs’ living room and presses the phone to her ear, heart thumping as it rings.

And rings. And rings. Before finally:

_“We’re sorry, the number you have called is not in service at this time. Please check the number or try your call again.”_

Eve’s breath hitches, her eyes filling with tears as she drops the phone and _fuck_ , she thinks, _fuck fuck fuck._

They’d had the conversation almost six months ago; Eve had written the new number down, every digit, checked the sequence twice. _Twice._

And she’d forgotten to learn it. She’d fucking _forgotten._

It’s the final punch in the gut, the last straw. Eve stands from the couch on shaky legs, her vision blurred as the air is sucked from her lungs. She stumbles to the door, her only focus on getting out of the house and into the open air, where she can scream or cry or curl up in peace.

She hardly notices Villanelle, standing in the kitchen as she makes for the door; she hardly feels the hand that reaches to steady her, hardly hears the concern in her voice as she calls out her name.

Eve pushes away, pushes all of it away, and pushes open the door to the outside world, falling gladly into its wide open space and letting it drag her down, down, down, until all she feels is the damp grass beneath her knees and the wind as it whips the first drops of rain into her face.

She returns two hours later, when the sky falls.

The air had been cold against her skin, but not quite biting, and it had forced her mind to clear after several deep breaths. Thoughts of Bill, Elena, Kenny, Niko, her mother, had been pervasive in her mind, violent as the storm that had come rushing suddenly over the surface of the lake, forcing her up to her feet and back to the warm, dry refuge of the house.

It is dark inside, save for the soft white glow of the kitchen’s under-cabinet lighting: the clock on the wall reads 11:24pm, and the wind whistles against the windows, wailing for a way in.

Eve takes the familiar route to the liquor cabinet, and pours herself a drink. Vodka straight, minus the chaser. It tastes foul, like mouthwash; it burns a slow path down her throat, and she closes her eyes against the sting of it, bracing her free hand on the edge of the counter.

And she sighs, heavily, for three very long seconds, as the weight of her crimes and her thoughts rest on her shoulders, threatening to crush her into the ground, to snuff her out.

Like Raymond. Like Hélène. Like Greig.

Maybe it’s all Eve deserves. To be crushed.

When she hears someone behind her, she knows instinctively who it is, but her bones are loathe to move. Where would she even go?

Villanelle steps in close to Eve, so close that her breasts brush her back. Eve closes her eyes, takes a long sip of her vodka as Villanelle’s hands settle over her hips, her breath moving soft and unhurriedly against her neck through her hair.

Eve doesn’t flinch as deft fingers slip up one side of her shirt, all the way up. She doesn’t flinch as the material at the back of her neck is thumbed down, revealing the angry scar on her shoulder from where the bullet had torn into her.

Really, she’s been waiting for this moment. She’s played it out in her mind.

She hears Villanelle’s breath change behind her; caught somewhere between a hitching sob and shaking realisation. Eve feels her eyes prickle with tears as the other woman drops her mouth, so gently and hesitantly, to the rough area of skin that she’d created, the site of their combined torment and pain. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but Eve whimpers anyway – Villanelle retracts a little, presses her forehead to Eve’s back, and Eve knows she’s staring at it, staring like she’s remembering, staring like she can’t quite understand.

It breaks her heart a little, so Eve leans her head back against Villanelle’s chest, until they’re so close that their faces are side by side.

As the rain beats furiously against the windows, Villanelle wraps an arm around Eve’s waist, sighs shakily into the hair at nape of her neck as Eve grabs onto her arm with both hands.

For a second Villanelle thinks that she is going to push her away.

Eve just holds her in place.

“I hurt you,” Villanelle says suddenly, her voice so torn and anguished, as if realising for the first time the reality of what she’s done. And maybe this is the first time she truly understands, and she sounds so full of regret and guilt that the tears that have been welling in Eve’s eyes finally start to run down her cheeks.

“I hurt you first,” Eve whispers, a half-hearted attempt to justify their actions, to put them on even ground.

But they aren’t on even ground, not right now, and Eve isn’t sure how to get them to a place where they can truly be equal. The idea makes her shoulders shake, makes the tears come more furious, more defeated.

Villanelle’s grip on her tightens, and suddenly both arms are around her waist, hugging her tightly and resolutely.

“Don’t cry,” Villanelle pleads softly, her mouth open and trembling against Eve’s neck. “Eve, please.”

Of course, this makes Eve cry harder. She can practically hear Villanelle’s heart break in the shuddering breath she takes, as she turns Eve around and takes her into her embrace. Eve presses her face to her shoulder and sobs for all she’s worth, clings to her shirt and does her best to concentrate on Villanelle’s strong hands on her back, her soft voice in her ear, and then her face.

“ _Eve_ ,” Villanelle whispers fearfully against her wet cheek, pulling back to cup her face in one hand, wiping her tears with her thumb. “It’s okay.”

Eve chokes at that, shakes her head furiously because no, it’s not okay, it can’t be okay, how the hell could it _ever_ be?

Lips brush her own then, soft and encouraging, and it would be so easy to give in to her taste, to shut her mind off and just kiss her, but Eve turns her head, tears slipping faster down her face.

Villanelle follows her, pecks her lips once, twice, three times before Eve finally flattens her palms against her collarbones to hold her at bay.

“Don’t,” she whispers with a sniffle. “Don’t please, I–I can’t.”

Villanelle’s face falls a little. “What do you mean?” She steps in close then, trails the backs of her fingers down Eve’s jawline. “Tell me, Eve.”

And Eve can see, can _hear,_ how desperate Villanelle is to bridge the gap between them, to understand. Eve appreciates it, but the words don’t come. Beyond her appreciation lies anger, boiling and brewing and rising, leaving her mouth sour and her tongue swollen and wet with her fury.

If she could step back, she would, but her back is against the counter. She’s stuck in place; trapped.

Where would she even go?

“Please, Eve,” Villanelle tries again, her eyes wild with a controlled desperation. “I can’t follow your thought process, it–I find it confusing. It hurts me.”

And Eve, before she can even think about it, scoffs.

The sound is muted, and wet, but Villanelle catches it loud and clear. Her cheek twitches, and she takes a step back.

Eve could run right now if she wanted to. Maybe deep down she _does_ want to.

But where would she even go?

“Don’t do that,” Villanelle says sharply, her voice low, irritable.

And Eve knows that she _shouldn’t_ – she knows that Villanelle is so much more than they’d all first thought her to be. Dr Martin had confirmed that for her. But it is, undoubtedly, so much easier to remember when Villanelle had been heartless in her eyes. When she’d been nothing more than the cruel, evil, cold-blooded killer who had taken first her best friend and then her life as she knew it.

When she’d been Villanelle, assassin.

When had Oksana shone through? And why in the fuck had Eve allowed it?

“Talk to me,” Villanelle says, again.

Eve’s brain lights up. Suddenly the words are spilling out and they are loathe to stop for anything, no matter how genuine Villanelle appears to be.

She had, after all, been genuine when she’d shot Eve, too.

“This can’t work,” she whispers, her voice shaking. “Nothing here can work, we…God, what have we _done_ to each other?”

Villanelle’s face has gone grey with concern. “Eve–”

“You _shot_ me, Villanelle.”

“You stabbed _me_ ,” Villanelle counters, brow knitted in confusion. “But none of that matters anymore, we are equal now.”

Eve shakes her head. “No,” she breathes, voice wet with her tears as she witnesses Villanelle take another step away from her. “No, we’re not. It’s not the same. I could pretend that it is, we both could. We could pretend this makes us the same, or even...but the truth is that it doesn’t. It just doesn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” and Villanelle is breathless, clenching her fists by her sides in frustration. She’s forgiven Eve for Paris, for _everything_ – why can’t Eve do the same? “Tell me why.”

“Because you _left_ me,” Eve blurts out in a short sob, arms tight around herself as she trembles. “You shot me and then you walked away. I bet you didn’t even look back. I didn’t do that, I stayed, I tried to _help you_.”

It’s there again – that involuntary twitch inside Villanelle’s cheek. “You’re very keen on being better than me,” she snaps, her eyes growing dark. “You think you’re sooo much better than me, well let me tell you, _Eve,_ you are _just_ as cold as I am.”

“You ruined my _life._ ”

“You ruined _mine_!” Villanelle growls, something indescribable flashing across her face. “I had _everything_ before I met you, everything! Then suddenly it was all gone, my job, my home, my money, and I was bleeding out in the back of a cab. But I fought, I _fought_ my way back to you because I thought you were special. I thought you cared about me, but you never did, did you?”

“Of course I cared about you!” Eve breaks, heart hammering inside her chest as her vision blurs, propelling her to take one angry step towards the other woman. “I stayed! I never would’ve left you to die! I might have felt like that once, but in the moment I never actually could! And I thought, I _really_ thought, that you couldn’t either!”

“I didn’t want to kill you!” Villanelle yells, exasperated. Why can’t she understand!? “I just, was angry, and hurt, and–!”

“And you articulated it the best way you know how. You decided that if you couldn’t have me, nobody could.”

Villanelle throws her hands out to the side, incredulous. “You’re alive, aren’t you!?”

“Oh yeah,” Eve laughs bitterly, “because living is _so_ much better.”

Villanelle stops at that, goes cold. The room seems to grow cold with her. “You would rather be dead, than be with me?”

“Right now? Fucking absolutely.”

The change in Villanelle is no slow process – Eve watches her soft edges grow sharp, watches as the light in her eyes flickers and fades, replaced with something detached, something angry.

She watches Oksana disappear, and thinks to herself that this moment right here, is the closest she’s come to truly seeing Villanelle.

Had this been what Bill had seen, right before he’d died?

“Is that why you went to Alaska, mm?” Villanelle bites, glaring at her.

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“Oh bullshit,” Villanelle seethes. “Bullshit, Eve. That’s your problem. You convince yourself and everyone around you that you have no idea why you do the things you do when deep down, you know. You know exactly what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, but it scares you. So you lie, to me, to your friends, to yourself. Because you can’t handle the parts of you that are really _you_.”

“You think you have the moral high ground here?” Eve almost laughs in her disbelief. “You horrify me. That isn’t love. It’s possession. It’s _jealousy_.”

Villanelle’s neck goes red. “Stop it, Eve.”

“It’s pathetic.”

“Don’t you _dare._ ”

“Why!?” Eve screams at her, because she does dare, how could she not? She’s never been so angry, and she’s never seen Villanelle more angry, but she can’t stop, won’t stop. She’s too far gone. “You can’t handle the truth!? Well here it is, _Oksana_ — sometimes we can’t have what we want! And the rest of us, we make our peace and we deal with it, but _you_? You fired a gun and you ran, the _second_ you lost control! _That_ is why we aren’t the same! _That_ is why we can never _be_ the same! You make it impossible!”

It rips through the space between them, the final blow, the bullet to end it all. Eve knows her words are hurtful, knows they aren’t entirely truthful, but she’s overcome with the dark, ugly urge to push Villanelle until she breaks. Desperate to hurt her, to see how far she can go before it all blows to hell.

Villanelle is shaking – her face is almost purple and her eyes are _feral_ and shit, Eve thinks, she really might kill her this time.

“Then _fucking leave_ ,” Villanelle snarls at her, an animal snapping at its prey to scare it to death.

And then, before Eve can even think to be terrified, Villanelle is storming past her towards the door. She slams into it with her whole body, almost ripping it off of its hinges as it flies open against the wind and the hail still crashing down on top of their heads, threatening to swallow the house whole.

Just like that, the storm has peaked, and Villanelle is gone.


	12. Litost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The consequences.

_litost: [noun] — a state of agony or torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery_

Villanelle doesn’t come back that night.

Eve falls into a fitful sleep on the couch, her body thrumming with fury and exhaustion. The tears stop around two am – by that point she has nothing more to give. It’s been cathartic, in a way, but while she feels a good deal lighter, she certainly does not feel better.The storm rages on all throughout the night, violent and seemingly unending, and it’s only that morning, more than ten hours since Villanelle had fled, that Eve lets herself think about the events that had unfolded between them.

It had gotten too real. Too personal. She’d said so many things shehad meant, and so many that she hadn’t.

And now, Villanelle is gone.

Her body, still vibrating, still radioactive with the force of her anger, will not allow guilt to settle.

She is subconsciously readying herself for the moment Villanelle will burst through the door. Maybe she will scream at Eve, maybe she’ll hit her; maybe she will crush her hands around her throat and watch the blood pool from her cheeks into her eyes. Maybe she will do nothing, say nothing.

It occurs to Eve – frustratingly, predictably – that any scenario would be okay, because any scenario is better than the one where Villanelle doesn’t come back at all.

Konstantin seems sure that this is nothing to worry about; Villanelle is a known flight risk, he claims, is forever disappearing. Still, at Yelena’s horrified expression, he carries out his usual checks – her phone is missing, but her wallet is on her bedside table. She will not get far without money, he points out, but Yelena simply motions to the window overlooking the driveway.

The white Audi that belongs to Villanelle has also disappeared.

It is midday. “She could be anywhere by now,” Irina thinks aloud, her voice betraying her nerves.

It’s in this moment that guilt begins to creep into Eve’s stomach.

It’s minute at first, mitigated by her own justifications that everything she’d said had been a long time coming, that it had been warranted. But when Villanelle has still not returned the next morning, Eve’s justifications suddenly aren’t quite enough anymore. She realises that the house feels empty without her, unbearably quiet, and Eve feels off, unsteady…

Eve feels alone.

_What have I done?_

Day two comes and goes, and on day three, Yelena snaps. Eve hears her in the kitchen telling Konstantin “get out there and find her, right now. It’s freezing after that storm, she’ll catch her death.”

“She needs time, _moya lyubov_ ,” he protests gently. “She will be very angry.”

“Well, tough,” Yelena barks, thrusting a pointed finger towards the door behind him. “You find her and bring her home.”

So, he goes that morning, knows he cannot return empty-handed, and by dusk, the niggling discomfort in Eve’s chest has turned to full-blown panic.

It had been a bad idea to have it out with her that night. Eve had been a mess of her feelings, unable to decipher anything about herself, and Villanelle had just been trying to understand so she could help. Eve had taken this for granted, been blind to what a monumental feat that had to have been for Villanelle, and she’d gotten angry. She’s always been good at starting confrontations, always been good at fuelling them, defending herself into the ground when she didn’t have to, just to make herself feel better. And while fighting with Villanelle had certainly allowed a weight to lift from her shoulders, she thinks she’d probably do anything to have that weight back again.

She wishes, now, that her catharsis hadn’t come at Villanelle’s expense. What if she’s in trouble? What if she’s hurt?

She paces the living room until the moon is peaking through, makes it that long before the itching under her skin becomes unbearable. She grabs the phone, dials the number written on the post-it note beside it, and prays to God that this time, they’ll get through.

It rings nine times, each vibration more nauseating to the ear than the last, until the automated voicemail message flows over her skin, repeating for the nineteenth time that day.

After the most painful of high-pitched vibrations, Eve’s words start working, slowly and guiltily on a thick tongue. “Hey, it’s uh, it’s me. Look, um … I know you’re angry with me, which is—I-I get that. But we need to talk, and I think … we both said some things that … it’s been three days, Villanelle. Just ... come back, okay? Please.”

Her phone slips away to the coffee table as she herself slips away to her guilt, and she’s left with a shattered mug and glass eyes and more blood on her hands than what she’d started with.

A throat clears from the doorway, startling Eve into a gasp. She’s more than a little surprised to see Carolyn there, frowning at her.

“Carolyn.”

Carolyn nods to her lap, concerned. “Your hand.”

Eve glances down, wincing to see blood seeping from her palm where she’d tried to stop her mug from falling. “It’s fine, it’s just a cut,” Eve rushes out, sniffling as she grabs some tissues to stem the bleeding. She’s glad the mug was empty – coffee would have stained the cream carpet. “What are you doing here, Carolyn?”

“My business in Whistler resolved rather quickly, so I was intending to discuss things further regarding the Twelve,” Carolyn explains, taking the seat beside Eve on the couch. “But I hear our assassin has gone rogue.”

“She hasn’t gone _rogue_ ,” Eve mutters under her breath, collecting the last pieces of the mug from the floor and placing them in a pile on the coffee table. “She left.”

Carolyn blinks, unfazed. “Yes, well I thought I’d check in before heading back to my hotel.”

“Great,” Eve sighs, clenching her fist around the tissue, pleased when it stings.

Carolyn looks at her then, hard, like she’s a lightbulb that refuses to change. “You surprised me, Eve.”

“Disappointed you, you mean?” _Sorry to disappoint_ , she remembers telling Villanelle.

“Rather a strong word. You did do the one thing that I hadn’t anticipated.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“You fell in love with her.”

Eve feels her heart grind to a halt. “…That’s…I’m not in love with her, Carolyn.”

“Come now, Eve, I’ve told you before. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

“I’m not _pretending_ ,” Eve gapes, her voice shrill. “I don’t love her, I…I don’t.”

“I quite believe that you don’t want to. It would, after all, be a damn sight easier to hate her. She did shoot you.”

Eve opens her mouth, but closes it immediately when she realises, with some degree of horror, that she had actually been about to defend Villanelle – because Carolyn had screwed her over too, had thrown her under the bus for Aaron Peel, had used her, and it still makes Eve’s blood boil, probably always will.

She hopes that her near-slip has gone unnoticed, but Carolyn’s eye for detail is second-to-none, and the resigned twitching at the corner of her mouth tells Eve that she’s lost the argument.

After Carolyn has left (leaving Eve with more questions yet again), Eve finally takes Yelena’s advice, and foregoes the couch for Villanelle’s bed. The sheets are soft, ought to be warm and comfortable, but sleep doesn’t come easy. Being here, she can’t help but expect a warm body beside her, expect Villanelle’s arms around her waist, her mouth against her shoulder.

One night spent here had become ingrained into her memory, become a part of her natural instincts, as much as Villanelle herself had become. When she does fall asleep, she dreams – dreams of Alaska, of spaghetti, of Villanelle’s head between her legs and against her neck.

Eve scratches at her wound, strains for the pain of it to distract herself from the aching wetness further south that calls for her fingers. She dreams of her for hours, awakens on day four hot but hopeful.

It all comes crashing down that same evening.

Irina is in her bedroom upstairs. Yelena and Eve are in the living room, watching TV to distract themselves. They hear it first, being on the ground floor of the house – the sound of an engine revving, of tyres screeching to a halt just outside. Both women only have time enough to exchange confused glances before the front door is crashing open.

There is scuffling on the floor, crying, heated fragments of a furious Russian yelling match. Eve springs off the couch, followed by Yelena, and they race to the kitchen, unprepared for the sight which greets them.

Konstantin is _livid_ , scowling and yelling and desperately trying to keep his arms locked around the woman in his arms, who kicks and spits at him like a wild animal. Her face is bruised; her nose is bleeding; the dress she wears barely covers her ass.

Eve almost vomits at the sight of her.

“ _O bozhe moy_ ,” Yelena gasps, tears filling her eyes as she races to Villanelle. “Oksana!”

“Upstairs!” Konstantin yells, grunting as he pins Villanelle again, before she can lash out. “Upstairs!”

Yelena does as she’s told, rushes upstairs in a panic, grabbing Irina on the way, stopping her from running past her. “Why!?” Irina cries, struggling against her mother as she bundles her back into her bedroom, away from an image which would surely scare her. “Why, what’s wrong!? No! Elle!”

Downstairs, Villanelle _screams_ , a blood-curling sound that rips through the whole house, scrapes at the walls. Konstantin winces but drags her through the kitchen and up the stairs, painstakingly, meeting Yelena in the bathroom where she has already grabbed several towels along with the first aid kit.

Eve follows blindly, hears the shower turn on inside the bathroom. She’s frozen in place, terrified as she watches Konstantin climb into the bathtub fully clothed, dragging Villanelle in on top of him, despite her desperate attempts to wriggle free.

The noise of it all is deafening – Yelena shouts at Konstantin in a panic, “you’ll drown her, she’s hurting, stop that!” but he swears back in Russian, _yey eto nuzhno!_ and _uspokoysya!,_ and Villanelle shouts at all of them, jerking away and struggling in his arms. She screams so much her throat goes hoarse, and suddenly she’s bursting into tears, loud and uncontrolled, and she’s still begging to be let go but she’s holding onto Konstantin, crushing his arms to her chest and sobbing with her head hung low.

Yelena presses her fist to her own mouth to stifle her sobs, and with her free hand, reaches for Villanelle’s hair, pushing it back from her face as the water beats down on top of her and Konstantin, soaking them to the bone.

Eve’s own tears come fast and furious then, as she kneels down by the tub and reaches out, desperate for the world to hold still, desperate to be able to take a second to understand what the fuck is happening because this?

This is something she’d never thought possible. Something she has to touch. Something she has to stop.

But Konstantin stops her with a firm look, pulls Villanelle to one side slightly, just out of her reach.

Eve sees it for what it is, realises it’s probably for the best. She leans back on her knees and trembles quietly, while Villanelle’s sobs and wails grow quieter, quieter, quieter.

Somehow, the quiet is worse.

Yelena cleans her up. Eve lingers outside of the bathroom door, unable to bring herself to go downstairs until she can be sure that Villanelle has calmed down. Irina hovers nervously by her side, squinting, trying to make out what her mother is saying.

She tells Eve that her mother is asking Villanelle if she knows where she is, what day it is, which city she’s in. Eve is relieved when all of Villanelle’s responses return correctly.

Irina narrows her eyebrow then, tells Eve “she just asked her if this is like last time, in Amsterdam.”

Eve frowns, confused. Her first instinct reminds her of Giethoorn, but she remembers after a few moments that Villanelle had been to Amsterdam before, when she’d made a show of murdering a man and stringing him up in a Red Light district window.

Could that be what Yelena is referring to? What had happened? And how would Yelena even _know_ about it? How long had she been assuming the role of Villanelle’s caregiver? Had she and Konstantin always held those positions in Villanelle’s life?

Finally assured enough that Villanelle won’t implode and take them all with her, Eve pads quietly downstairs, intent on giving her the space she clearly needs. Konstantin is in the kitchen; his cheek is scratched-up, and the hellish experience of the last day reflects vividly on his tired face. When he lifts his glass to his lips to sip at his whiskey, Eve sees the purple memory of a fight on his knuckles, and wonders if he’d had to throw the first punch in Villanelle’s defence.

The thought makes her stomach churn. She pushes it away.

He smiles weakly at her as she takes the seat next to him at the breakfast bar. “You need to get some sleep,” he tells her.

Eve scoffs lightly. “You aren’t looking so hot either, y’know.”

He laughs a little at that, finishing off the remainder of his drink with a sharp hiss of breath. “Ah, yes, well. We can sleep better tonight.”

_Now that she’s home. Now that she’s safe._ It goes unsaid, but the sentiment passes between them all the same.

He pours himself another drink; motions for her to join him, to which she declines. “I have asked Jerome to come and visit.”

Eve blinks. Who the fuck is Jerome? “Should I know who that is?”

He tuts to himself then, nodding as he realises that his mistake. “Ah, sorry. Sometimes I forget you do not know everything.”

Eve scoffs. “Not by choice.”

“Well, Jerome is an old friend. We used to work together.”

“For the Twelve?”

“Yes. He would assess our colleagues.”

“Like a personal trainer?”

“Jerome’s specialty is more to do with the mind.”

“What, like a shrink?”

“That – is the American word, yes.”

Eve balks. “You called her ex- _shrink_?”

He sighs, exasperated. “You have a better idea?”

“We could have taken at least another day to try and come up with one!”

“It is done now,” he says, dismissing her attempts to argue. “He will come the day after tomorrow, with Carolyn. Apparently he will be staying at her hotel. Then, we can make plans for the Twelve. Get you your answers, yes?”

“I seriously doubt she’s going to be very forthcoming with him, Konstantin.”

To this, he exhales lowly, levelling her with a hard look. “You know, Eve, there is a lot more to her than you think. A lot more in here.” He rests his hand over his heart then, and _shit,_ Eve realises, she’s being _reprimanded._ “She may just surprise you.”

Eve blinks, a little stunned, but finds that she cannot offer a retort. She fears he just might be right.

She fiddles with the ends of her shirt, thinking. After several beats, she asks “what happened in Amsterdam?”

His face gives nothing away. “Amsterdam?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Eve sighs, far too tired for his bullshit, with far too few answers about everything. “Back in February. What did she do?”

He seems to consider her for a long moment, before sighing, signalling his resignation. “She was waiting for you,” he explains hesitantly, and somewhat vaguely. “She thought you would come to find her.”

Eve remembers that Jess had gone to investigate her latest kill instead, on Carolyn’s instruction. She’d been shackled to her desk.

“It was not a good moment for her,” he continues, his face going dark as the memory seems to filter in his mind. “She–lost her grip of herself. I’d never seen her quite so dangerous.”

“She was angry,” Eve surmises, her chest aching a little.

“She was sad,” he clarifies. “If I hadn’t found her, I…”

He trails off then, leaves the sentence hanging in the air, unfinished. Eve is grateful for it, and makes the resolute decision then and there that Villanelle needs all the help and support she can get, even if she herself doesn’t recognise it.

The prospect should be daunting, should be terrifying.

Instead, it feels like the most natural response in the world.

Unfortunately, it isn’t going to be as easy as Eve hoped.

The house has ground to a stand-still, its occupants teetering on a knife’s edge as they wait tentatively for Villanelle to awake from her fitful sleep the next day. It had been an uneasy night for everyone – every so often, Eve would be startled awake by the sounds of thumping and clanging coming from upstairs, and like clockwork, a door would click open in response from the other end of the hallway. Eve had lain awake and listened as light feet had padded back and forth across the landing all night; had listened as angry Russian whimpers were met with soft assurances and a calm mantra of hushing, over and over again.

Eve had longed to climb the stairs more than once during the night, longed to be the one murmuring words of comfort into Villanelle’s ear as she struggled to find peace in sleep. The sadist in her had driven her to a curiosity that itched like spiders under her skin – was Villanelle crying into her pillow? Was she driving her fingernails into her own arms? Was she rocking back and forth on the bed, clutching at her hair to keep the voices out of her head?

And – holy _shit._ When had her mind turned to such darkness? Was her desperation to go to Villanelle rooted in a sadistic desire to see her suffer? Was guilt the driving force?

Or did the idea of Villanelle so desolate and broken claw at Eve’s chest because of something altogether else?

_You fell in love with her._ That’s what Carolyn had claimed.

But that’s preposterous. Impossible. There’s no way on Earth.

What would Eve even _do_ with that?

When morning breaks, the house is quiet, slowly coming to life. The coffee brews in the kitchen as Irina watches the morning news; Yelena gets to work on a massive pot of soup, chopping and dicing vegetables like she’ll cry if she stops, even for a minute. Konstantin doesn’t come downstairs until around midday – Eve observes him quietly from her spot on the couch, wonders at the weariness in the lines of his forehead, the red that sparks in the whites of his eyes.

He has every symptom of a worried father, and it tugs at Eve’s heart. He truly loves Villanelle, she realises, so much so his worry for her is eating him alive; has forced him to seek professional help from an ex-terrorist psychiatrist. It fills Eve with an odd sense of relief that she cannot explain.

Villanelle surfaces from her dark solitude like a shark – silent, calculating, then with all the rage and intensity of a killer. Eve hears shuffling upstairs – slow movements that you’d miss if you weren’t really paying attention. Eve counts the steps – there are only eleven of them – and is only slightly startled by the sound of a door opening.

Eve rises from the couch, swallowing hard. The Vasilievs are out; Yelena is at the store, and Konstantin is in the garden with Irina. Nobody else is around to hear what Eve is hearing.

That makes Villanelle Eve’s responsibility in this moment. Right?

Without much further thinking, Eve ascends the stairs, as slow as the feet she’d been listening to. She steels herself for the dark surprise of something jumping out at her, throwing her back down.

Villanelle’s bedroom door is open. Eve’s attention is drawn to the bathroom across the landing, where the sound of running water is now apparent in the otherwise quiet of the house.

Eve stands at the top of the stairs, unsure of what to do. The sound of the water shutting off frightens her, and she’s overcome with the urge to turn and race back down the stairs but her legs won’t let her move.

She almost misses the door opening, almost misses the way Villanelle’s eyes briefly meet her own.

She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t miss anything.

Villanelle wears clothes that she would absolutely hate if she were in her right mind. Her legs are clad in black sleep bottoms, and she wears a big zip-up hoodie over a wrinkled light blue shirt. Eve’s eyes follow her shadow along the wall, watch her shuffle from the bathroom back to her bedroom, and when Eve’s legs finally begin to cooperate with her brain again, she wills them to take her forward, until she stands in the doorway of the bedroom, frozen as she takes Villanelle in, as if for the first time.

Her face looks worse in the cold sunlight, purple and patchy. Eve is horrified, has to fight like Hell to stifle the gasp that hitches in her throat. Villanelle catches it, however, and makes a point of looking Eve straight in the eye as she takes off her hoodie to reveal the blood staining her button-down shirt.

Eve watches with rapt attention as Villanelle’s bruised, battered hands undo the buttons of her shirt, watches as the material slides from her shoulders to the floor, revealing the lace black bra and the taut stomach underneath. She is bruised and cut, and there, in amongst the blooming reds and purples, is the small pink scar left behind by Eve’s blade. It feels like forever ago, but it judges her now, as do Villanelle’s eyes, which burn their accusations across the room.

_You did this to me. All of it._

Eve feels her fingers flicker at the sight of her injuries, their natural instinct to reach out. Her eyes fill with tears, and her face hardens suddenly – as if her brain has suddenly remembered the correct way she is supposed to react. “Where have you been? What happened to you?”

“None of your business,” Villanelle murmurs, her voice still hoarse from last night but just as dark as ever. “Can you fetch Konstantin for me?”

And, fuck, that _stings_. Eve wonders if she ever did this with Anna – came to her hurt and feeling sorry for herself, closed off and unreadable. It’s an unsettling thought, causes Eve’s stomach to knot with guilt. “Villanelle, what I said … I didn’t mean it.”

“Which parts didn’t you mean?”

“Any of it,” Eve breathes out, even if that isn’t strictly true. It just feels right to say anything that might make all of this hurt less. Make _her_ hurt less. “I … I didn’t mean to hurt you, okay?”

Villanelle laughs; calls bullshit. “You didn’t.”

“Villanelle.”

“No, really. You didn’t. I don’t feel pain with you anymore.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t lie to me, let’s just–talk about this.”

“I have nothing to say. Can you please get Konstantin for me.”

“Please, Vill,” Eve whispers, voice thick. “Let me help you.”

Villanelle looks at her then, studies her really, but Eve isn’t struck by the same kind of awe that she usually is when their eyes meet. She is looking right through her. She isn’t listening.

Eve sighs shakily, her chest constricting with panic at the thought of the woman being so close, yet so out of reach.

“Villanelle,” she implores. “ _Oksana_. Let me help you.”

“Get Konstantin. Now.”

“Fine,” Eve whispers, tears in her eyes as she turns on her heel and storms out of the room, aware with every step she takes of the distance growing between them, pushing them further and further apart.

She doesn’t see Villanelle again until late that evening, having successfully managed to steer clear of her since their latest interaction. In all fairness, Villanelle makes it easy for her, choosing to seclude herself in her bedroom once again after Eve had withdrawn. Eve has since opted to ignore the second floor of the house entirely, giving herself the chance to stew in her feelings while she goes through the motions, endeavouring to make sense of them all. There are several.

It is around seven pm that evening when her efforts at evasion are scuppered, and it’s nobody’s fault, really – it serves as a reminder that a house may be fairly large, but at the end of the day, it comprises only of four walls and a roof, and while Eve would’ve jumped at the chance to be in such proximity to Villanelle when her job had depended on it, the reality of being separated from her by a wall or a set of stairs only is more terrifying than it is anything else.

Villanelle has moved downstairs, in a twist Eve hadn’t seen coming. She’s been outside for the last half an hour, smoking by the lake and watching the ash melt into the dew-dipped grass, as the sun had gone down across the water. The sudden chill in the air pricks at Eve’s cheeks, making them pink and tight, and she makes the short walk back up to the house, intent on curling up on the couch with a cup of tea, watching TV until she eventually dozes off.

Her intentions are immediately dashed. As Eve takes off her coat and shoes at the back door, she can hear soft murmuring coming from the living room, through the space left by the ajar door. Assuming it to be the television, Eve heads for the kitchen to boil the kettle, but is halted in her path immediately by the sight she catches out of the corner of her eye.

In the living room, Villanelle lies on the couch, on her side with her knees curled up to her chest. Her head rests in Yelena’s lap, and the older woman, with one eye on the TV, is singing softly to her, only slightly off-key. It’s a French lullaby, one that Villanelle is clearly familiar with; though her eyes are closed, her lips move softly in time as Yelena sings, as though mouthing the worlds will help her keep up.

For the second time today, Eve is suddenly reminded of Anna, andas she watches Yelena stroke Villanelle’s hair in one smooth, continuous pattern, she wonders if Anna ever did this sort of thing with her, back when she’d just been Oksana.

The dark twist of jealousy she feels suddenly in her stomach is sharp and, undoubtedly, unexpected, but then, is it really? How is it possible that anything surprises her anymore?

Like everything else, she pushes past it, continues on her way to the kitchen and watches, in silence, the steam rising from the kettle as it boils.


	13. Palinoia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a big one!!  
> A massive thank you to everyone still following/commenting/leaving kudos! It means the world and I'm so grateful!

_palinoia: [noun] — the obsessive repetition of an act until it is perfect or mastered_

Villanelle had not missed Jerome, she’d realised.

Yesterday she had sat across from him in the Vasilievs’ living room, for a performance quite different to the ones she’s used to putting on; her audience had comprised of the man himself, along with Carolyn, Konstantin, and, of course, in the back of the room, Eve.

Villanelle hadn’t been performing for her benefit this time – had maybe even been doing so in spite of her presence, lingering in the corner. Still, she’d been careful to catch Eve’s eye when Jerome had asked about Rome; been sure to crane her neck deliberately in her direction when he’d asked “what’s your state of mind?”

“I am tired,” she’d said, coolly and to the point, “and could probably hurt myself without trying very hard.”

“I told you she was not in good health,” Konstantin had snapped at Carolyn (apparently – and to Villanelle’s delight – she has been causing a stir between them). “She has been a mess.”

His eyes had flickered over to Eve in that moment, knowingly, and Villanelle had felt empowered to see the guilt twitch in Eve’s cheek.

Jerome had continued in the same vein – seeking answers from the core of her, from places that Villanelle hadn’t considered, or had repressed. He had asked how she feels – too vague, that question. He had asked what she was thinking – there’s no way he could ever comprehend it.

When he had asked what she wanted, however, she had not hesitated.

“I know what I want.”

Eve had looked mildly panicked – it had been briefly amusing. Villanelle had looked up from her chair, schooling the smile from her face, like any good actress.

“I want to work,” she’d said adroitly. “It’s important.”

“You will,” Jerome had reassured her, smiling a little, perhaps proud that Villanelle could grasp such a thing as importance. “But not until you are feeling better.”

Carolyn hadn’t liked that – seemingly she is also an impatient personality – but Jerome’s word had been final. As he’d stood to leave, he’d prescribed Villanelle a healthy regimen of good food and physical activity, to “lessen her anxieties,” and then, as if remembering something he’d failed to mention:

“And maybe, if possible, do not kill anyone until our next meeting? So I can judge your progress without that particular extrinsic motivator.”

_Demanding._ Still, Villanelle, never being one for half measures, has taken his suggestion of physical exercise extremely seriously. Throughout the course of the following days, seven online orders are delivered to the Vasiliev household; the living room floor is a mirage of colour and expense, as Villanelle, like an excited child on Christmas morning, wades through piles of Calvin Klein sports bras and leggings; checking the fit of her Balenciaga stretch-knit high-tops, before scooping up all of he new purchases and dumping them into her new navy Ralph Lauren duffle bag.

She smiles, satisfied, and heads for the basement immediately, where Konstantin has been doing all of his working-out these past few months (she’d laughed when he’d first told her that, poked at his big Russian bear belly). It’s a semi-professional exercise space – there is a treadmill against the wall, next to a rowing bike, and a punchbag hangs from the ceiling on the other side of the room. It’s more than enough to get Villanelle started.

She spends almost thirteen hours in the basement over three days, doesn’t allow herself to stop cycling or running until her vision is blurred and the sweat is dripping from her chin. The burn in her muscles is a delicious incentive, a reminder of the goal she strives for, aching throughout her whole body.

She’s hyper-aware that she’s likely pushing herself too hard, but she knows her own capabilities. Years ago, when Konstantin had first recruited her out of prison for the Twelve, her body had been weaker, unprepared for the training which had lain in front of her. They’d starved her to condition her body to survive without food, they’d kept her in the dark for three days to heighten her awareness, they’d broken a finger every time she’d failed to pick a lock in under twenty seconds.

Some might argue that a few of their methods were more counterproductive than others, but Villanelle isn’t so sure she’d discount any of them as ineffective – after all, broken bones heal, and her lock-picking technique is shit-hot now. She’s living proof that weak bodies break fast, rebuild strong.

She’d been weak these past few days. Probably into the last weeks and months. She knows that, and she won’t stand for it anymore, not when there persists to be a target on her back. She’ll rebuild strong.

Kill or be killed. The world she occupies is just that simple. The Twelve had always impressed that upon her, in every moment that they’d starved her, assigned her, paid her. It’d been fine, truly; the routine of assignment, kill, payday had been an easy one to understand, interspersed with all the clothes and food and sex that she could ever want.

She’d never bothered much with revenge – it would require that she cared, and she can’t think of a single time she ever has. This time, however, is different. This time they’ve fucked with her, are hunting her; they won’t stop until they’ve found her, she knows that, and she isn’t prepared to run forever.

She’s going to get her control back. Get her life back. The road back is clear.

She’s told, however, that it won’t be the same as before. Where her world had once been black and white, structured and somewhat clinical, centres of red now bloom, spreading and infecting the natural order of things, tickling like an itch that Villanelle has been longing to scratch since that day in a hospital bathroom in London.

Eve is the red. Red as the lipstick Villanelle had snuck into her handbag. Red as the blood that had pooled under her body in Rome. Konstantin had taught her the proper way to hold a gun, the proper angles and stances involved. She’d remembered this that day in April, when she’d fired in Eve’s direction. She thinks that perhaps, in that moment, she really had meant to kill her.

It’s better that she didn’t. Eve really does have a way of persisting when it comes to her, and it’s for this reason that things can’t be like they were before. If Eve is to be a permanent fixture in her life, it’s something Villanelle is going to have to reconcile.

It follows, then, that the next big question would be posed by Jerome on his next visit:

“So, Villanelle…you and Eve?”

Her and Eve. A great, big, complicated question, one which she’d thought she’d known the answer to all along but now elicits uncertainty.

“What about me and Eve?”

“I would like to know what you are thinking,” he says.

“I am thinking that there’s only so many times a woman can be rejected.”

Her stomach coils. She ought to feel angry, she’s sure. Maybe deep down she does.

“You want her to choose you.”

She rolls her eyes. “I want her to choose _something_. She is very fickle. But yes, choosing me is preferable.”

“How would that make you feel?”

“Like I was right.”

“Would you be happy?”

“Of course.”

“Because you would be right?”

Villanelle grins. “I’d love to see her husband’s face.”

It’s not really an answer, but his interest in her tangential approach piques. “Why?”

“Because he is ugly and creepy and I’m more than he is. I would have killed him for his moustache alone.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what?”

“Why didn’t you kill him?”

Villanelle shrugs, resigned. “Eve did not want me to.”

“As simple as that?”

“As simple as that. I learn from my mistakes.”

Jerome doesn’t need her to explain – he can see the memory of Anna as it storms across her face, vivid and violent. But he asks anyway.

“You think Anna wanted you to kill Max?”

It sounds, at first, accusatory, but Villanelle has also come to appreciate that perhaps she ought to afford people the benefit of the doubt every once in a while. It’s a self-validating way to think, reaffirms what she’s always known, what she wants everyone else to see.

He is not accusing her. He is not judging her. He is simply asking.

Can anything _be_ that simple?

Yes, it can. Because she’s not crazy. She’s not a psychopath, not entirely. She feels deeper than any of them.

“I think he trapped her and she couldn’t see it,” Villanelle replies. “I wanted to set her free.”

“For her own sake?”

“No,” she admits – she’s never lied about it. “For mine. So we could be together. But I see now that that was a dream. My dream. Not hers.”

There had been a time – back when she’d been climbing the walls of a Russian prison, steeped in a melting pot of anger, sweat and disgust – when she’d never have even considered the possibility that Anna’s idea of a future had differed in any way from her own. It wouldn’t have made sense for their visions to be different. Young Oksana had done everything she had been meant to — written letters, sent gifts, been charming and affectionate. Anna had simply been a liar, to her, to God and to herself. Oksana hadn’t known that, but Villanelle does.

She supposes this is Eve’s influence. Forcing her into retrospection.

It’s not all that bad.

“So you know now,” Jerome infers, “that Eve and Anna are not the same.”

She blinks. What an odd, funny conclusion for him to draw. All her life, she has been the only tangible being, the only with any autonomy, sense of self. Everyone else has been a means to an end, faceless, vessels of opportunity that existed only to serve her in some way. What did it matter if they were different, when _she_ was all that mattered?

Meeting Anna had certainly shifted her world view. Anna had stepped forward, when everyone else had stepped back, and she’d challenged Villanelle in ways that had both excited and terrified her. But she’d controlled it, controlled _them_ , sculpted the future in her image. Ana hadn’t had the courage to share in her vision for them – too complicated, it had seemed, even after Villanelle had removed the one true obstacle that had stood in their way (and his dick, for good measure).

This act of devotion hadn’t been enough for Anna, and it had taken weeks of hurt before Villanelle had been able to even question why.

Anna had been horrified by what she’d done; had paled at the sight of her husband’s blood, the smell of death that had clung to the apartment. Where her eyes had drained of all colour, something had sparked in Eve’s.

Anna had shut her out, turned her back on her.

Eve had chased her, enthralled.

It’s for this reason that she finds herself nodding in response to his question. “Yes,” she says. “They are not the same.”

_We’re the same._

He looks proud in this moment, tells her that she is doing well, making very good progress. She’s inclined to agree.

“I will get stronger,” she says, convicted. “I already feel stronger.”

“That is good. But remember, Villanelle, it is not all just about being physically healthy. You must be mentally prepared, too.”

“How do I do that?”

“A conversation. Perhaps a few. You must look back – confront the root of your pain and your anxieties.” A beat. “Talk to her. Find a solution, to part ways or to bury the hatchet.” And then, chastising himself: “So to speak.”

She’s never been one for half measures, so when she next sees Eve, that night in the kitchen while Yelena is starting dinner, Villanelle doesn’t waste any time. Wordlessly, she grabs her car keys and Eve’s coat, proffering it out for the other woman to put on.

Eve blinks, doesn’t make any move to take it. “What are you–”

“I’m burying the hatchet. I think. Come take a drive with me.”

Eve is still, her hands behind her on the kitchen counter. Yelena eyes them from the stove, stirring her soup. A beat passes.

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to kill you, Eve. Just–come withme.”

She watches the lining of Eve’s throat then; it bobs, straining harshly as indecision and panic storms across her face. Somewhere inside Villanelle’s chest, something constricts, bracing for the sting of rejection.

It doesn’t come. “Okay,” Eve murmurs, pushing off the counter and taking her coat from Villanelle.

The relief in Villanelle’s chest is welcome. She nods, smiles lightly in Yelena’s direction to appease her clear concern as she opens the door for Eve, allowing her to step through first.

“We will be back for dinner, Yelena.”

The older woman sighs, points the spoon at her in warning. “Don’t you dare kill each other, Oksana. There’s far too much soup for three.”

Villanelle drives the way she kills – fast, calculated, and just recklessly enough to be controllable. She keeps one hand loose on the wheel while the other skirts over the gearstick; her fingers flex over the curve, like they’re itching. For Eve, as a passenger, it’s unsettling. The drive has been quiet so far, with just the roaring hum of the engine as the car winds through the Whitehorse backroads, drifting bends effortlessly as they approach. It’s drizzling outside, and the sun is starting to set – any other day, it would’ve been a beautiful evening for a drive.

The idea is laughable. Nothing’s ever that simple.

“So,” Eve starts, pressing her thumbs nervously into her palms. “Are we going to talk, or…?”

Villanelle is quiet, promptly moves up a gear in spite of the upcoming bend.

Eve sighs, her stomach twisting. She knows she ought to make the first move. “I need to apologise to you,” she murmurs. “It—I know we’ve never done it before. Apologised, I mean. But I need to now.”

Villanelle’s eyes flicker over to her, patient, curious.

“I...I _am_ sorry,” Eve says, throat clenching with just how much she means it. 

The resulting left-turn Villanelle makes then is a touch too sharp. As the sun disappears into the dark, Eve’s thumbs press harder into her skin. Suddenly, the windscreen wipers have shifted up a speed, as the drizzle turns heavier.

She seeks to cut the tension. “Are you going to dump my body out here?”

The corner of Villanelle’s mouth quirks – she stays in high gear.“Let me ask you something,” she says, her foot pressing harder on the gas.

Eve feels her back fuse to the seat. “Okay?”

“Did you look for me, at all, these past months?”

“No,” Eve says quietly, glancing down at her hands. She’s not sure why she feels guilty about it. “I … needed to heal.”

Villanelle hums at that. Speeds up. Out of the corner of her eye, Eve sees her eyebrows shift in condescension.

Eve sighs sharply. “Don’t give me that face. You didn’t look for me either.” 

“No,” Villanelle concedes. “You’re right. I didn’t. I thought you were dead.”

Eve swallows as the rain gets harder. “Do you wish I _had_ died?”

Villanelle exhales, eyes flickering over to Eve. Her fingers clench around the gearstick. “Life would make more sense.”

Eve lets out a half-laugh, her eyes growing wet as the windows. “Fuck you.”

“I’m being honest, Eve.”

“Then answer me this, in the spirit of honesty – did you think about me?”

“Do you care if I did? What do you get out of that? How would that make you feel?”

“Don’t pull that Jerome bullshit on me, Villanelle, I swear–”

“I just want to know. You are such a head-fuck, Eve, and it’s – enough, now. So why are you here? Why are you here, with me, if you have such a problem? And don’t bullshit me.”

There is only stillness, Eve’s breathing. And then, finally, the truth:

“Because you’re the most exciting thing in my life.”

Villanelle guffaws as they tear round another bend. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Being with you makes me feel alive,” Eve breathes out, voice trembling as the weight of the world slides from her shoulders, as they race through the rain. “ _You_ make me feel alive. I was fine before I met you, then suddenly there you were, creeping into every corner of my life. Nothing was ever good enough again.”

“Except for me.”

Eve swallows hard then. “You—Jesus Christ, you’re going really fast.”

That doesn’t seem to faze Villanelle – if anything, she accelerates harder. She turns to Eve, eyes glinting, as if she’s been challenged, but _fuck_ that’s not what Eve had meant –

“What would you do if I crashed this car right now?”

Eve’s stomach drops, so quickly that she laughs because _what a sick thing to say_. “I’d fucking die, Villanelle, and so would you.”

Another bend – this time, Eve swears she can feel the tyres leave the road. The turn is far too tight. She looks at Villanelle, sees fire there, excited, daring, and it occurs to her that she might not be joking.

She grips the door handle, her knuckles quickly turning white as fear settles low in her gut. “Villanelle, slow down.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Villanelle sighs, sharpening the line of her jaw as she speeds up, to conceal the sadness that clings to the lines around her eyes. “You’re different from other people, Eve. You always have been, right from the moment we met.”

“Stop the car,” Eve chokes.

“But you are indecisive, and fickle, and you need to make a choice now, for both of our sakes.”

The next bend approaches at a blistering speed; it’s a hill’s edge, and Villanelle ought to drop down a gear to avoid any chance of them tumbling over the edge, down the hillside and into the river.

She doesn’t. 

“Slow down!” Eve exclaims, her voice shrill with panic. “You’re going to kill us both!”

“Make a decision,” Villanelle counters sharply. “I’ll respect it, this time, whatever it is.”

The bend is closer. “Vill!”

“I just need to know, Eve. If you’re with me, or if you’re against me.”

“I don’t–!”

“ _Don’t_ say you don’t know,” Villanelle snaps angrily, the car revving onwards, more determined than before. “You _do_ know. Fucking admit it for once!”

“Fuck, okay! Okay, you’re right! I _am_ indecisive, but I choose you!”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes! Fuck, yes, I mean it!”

“You promise me?”

They’re going to die. They’re going to crash and burn and drown and –

“I promise!”

The tyres screech. Eve jerks forward in her seat as the car squeals to a grinding halt just before the bend; her ears ring with the sound of the handbrake slamming on.

She doesn’t realise she’d screamed until everything has gone still, and then –

“Was that so hard to admit?”

Eve, through the tears in her eyes and in her throat, bursts into trembling laughter, her heart threatening to pound out of her chest. “You’re a terrible fucking driver.”

“I disagree. We didn’t crash.”

Villanelle softens then, reaches over and places one hand over Eve’s as they shake. “It’s okay. Look, the rain is stopping.”

Eve looks outside – she is right. While Eve takes a moment to calm down, Villanelle begins speaking again, softly. “I have been thinking, since my sessions with Jerome. That maybe I have done something in particular to poison you against myself.”

Eve is silent. Villanelle squeezes her hand.

“It is Bill. I know that. I…never did apologise. I…I am sorry, too, Eve.”

It’s the most sincere she’s ever sounded. A tear slips down Eve’s face then, rolling off her cheek. The ache of it can be felt in her entire body. “It...I may never fully forgive you for that.”

Villanelle nods, contemplating, and looks down at their hands. “I may never fully forgive you for some things, either.”

And the sting of that cuts, knife into bone, bullet unto flesh, but she supposes that it’s mutual, this pain between them, and even though the threat of death had been fast approaching, Eve finds she hadn’t been lying, when she’d promised Villanelle of her choice.

“Even?” Eve suggests, weary, but hopeful, lighter than she’s felt in months.

Villanelle smiles, radiates starlight as she touches the pad of her thumb to Eve’s own. “Even.”

Dinner that night isn’t perfect, but it’s as close to harmonious as they’ve been. While things are still stilted, measured with uncertainty, they manage their meal together at the dinner table with the Vasilievs, allow themselves to be swept up in Irina’s incessant chatter and Konstantin’s laughter, all the while stealing glances at one another behind forkfuls of food and mouthfuls of wine. It’s never been harder to tell what Villanelle is thinking, and later that night, as Eve curls up on the bay window of Villanelle’s bedroom, she realises that the apprehension she feels stems from something altogether else.

She wraps up in a warm blanket and a shawl, and stares out towards the night sky as it hangs above the lake, unable to chase away the chill in her skin. Villanelle pads in slowly then, walks up to her and kneels down by her side. Eve keeps looking out of the window. They’re quiet for a time, until finally Villanelle places her hand over Eve’s raised knee and squeezes.

“It is late, we should sleep.”

“I’ll sleep downstairs.”

“No, you won’t.” Villanelle sighs. “The couch is not comfortable. Stay here.”

“You’re still angry with me.”

“You are still angry with me, too.”

“No. Well, yeah. I don’t know. I’m always a little angry with you.”

“Mm, I know. You are also infuriating.”

“Asshole.”

Villanelle smiles at that.

Eve looks hard at her then, concerned. “What the hell happened to you? Last week.”

Villanelle shrugs, “Just a disagreement.”

Eve raises an eyebrow. “A disagreement, huh?”

“Mm.”

“I was worried about you,” Eve murmurs, reaching up to cup her face. She isn’t pushed away, instead Villanelle turns into her touch, closes her eyes and takes a breath. “I still am,” Eve adds softly, smoothing her thumb over her bruised cheek.

Villanelle smiles. “You care about me.”

“Yeah,” Eve sighs, suppressing the urge to roll her eyes. “So when you disappear it affects me.”

“I won’t do that again,” Villanelle says seriously, a silent promise.

“I don’t mean that,” Eve says, turning to face her properly. “I don’t want to stop you if you feel like you need to get away. I might not...agree, with your process, but it’s your process. I just...I want you to be safe.”

“Okay,” Villanelle nods. “I can do that.” She squeezes Eve’s arms softly then, smiles knowingly against the thumb on her lips. “You missed me, when I was gone?”

“Yeah,” Eve admits in a breath, easily and without hesitation because why deny it? After today, in the car, why hide how she feels? “Of course I missed you, I always miss you. Even now, you’re right here in front of me, and I still...you still feel lost to me.”

Villanelle’s face turns grave then, dark with upset and concern. Her grip of Eve’s arms grows instinctively firmer. “I’m not lost,” she whispers strongly. “I was, once, but you found me. You found me, Eve, and you’ve never lost me.” She sighs out a half-laugh, shaking her head in disbelief. “You couldn’t.”

Eve swallows hard the tears in her throat and bunches her fists in Villanelle’s shirt, clinging to her tightly, as if she might disappear if she were to let go.

Villanelle sees this act for what it is and lifts Eve’s chin with two curled fingers, making her face her for what she says next.

“I’m real, Eve,” she breathes, her voice soft with Russia and resolution. “Being here with you, like this? It’s never been more clear. You make me real.”

Eve breaks at that, gives in to the tears pressing behind her eyes, the sob bubbling in her throat. They come together, foreheads and hands, and when Eve finally dips down, her mouth tastes like salt and acceptance. Villanelle thinks she’s never tasted anything quite like it.

“Come here,” Eve whispers into her mouth, half-moaning as their tongues touch more bravely with every kiss. “Come here, come here.”

Villanelle presses forward then, crowds Eve as far back as she can in the small space of the bay window, and suddenly Eve’s arms are around her shoulders and she’s spreading her legs, dragging Villanelle closer, kissing her harder.

“Vill,” Eve whispers, hand clenching in Villanelle’s hair as the woman drags her tongue along her neck, soft and teasing. “Make me feel you.”

When teeth sink into her pulse point then, rough and sudden, Eve gasps out into the room, ignores the sting and tightens her grip on Villanelle’s hair, encourages her to do it again, do it harder, do it until she can look into a mirror and see for herself that Villanelle is here, with her, on her, always; as much a part of her as the scar on her shoulder.

For months, the thoughts and flickering images of this moment had terrified Eve, driven her down and further from reason. But here, now, allowing Villanelle to guide her back onto the bed as the world moves silent around them is the easiest, most natural thing she’s ever done.

Villanelle is devoted, kisses every inch of Eve’s skin she can reach, utterly focused. When their clothes are gone, Eve gives herself over to the feel of her, the soft lines of her back, the smooth stretch of her legs, the curve of her breasts and her shoulders. She sees Villanelle freeze at the sight of her, too, but Eve’s desperation can only stand to let her watch the awe on her face for all of two seconds.

“Later,” she breathes out, pulling her back in for another kiss, because yes, there would be a ‘later’ and they’d get there eventually but right now, Eve just needs to be swept under. The ache inside her is feverish – needs to be relieved, needs to implode.

Villanelle seems to share in her mindset, for the kiss she next captures Eve in is frantic, a most assured sign of things to come. Eve moans, her blood coming alive in her wrists as Villanelle’s hand steals down between their bodies. Their eyes meet, dark and shining in the quiet of the room, and Eve follows Villanelle’s hand down with her own, wordlessly, the inevitable culmination of this, their cat-and-mouse chase.

Fingers meet her centre, soft and probing. Eve flushes at the clear sound of her own arousal, but holds Villanelle’s gaze, kissing her quickly to stifle the moan that crawls up her throat when those fingers part her, pressing inside so deliberately that Eve feels herself growing impossibly wetter.

As Villanelle beckons her body expertly, Eve clutches to her back, remembering after a long, lust-fuelled moment that her other hand still rests on Villanelle’s stomach. She pauses, unsure, as if remembering only now that this is her first time with a woman. Villanelle steals the thought from inside her mind with a crushing kiss.

“Just touch me,” Villanelle whispers, voice cracking with something that Eve can’t quite name. Through her own pleasure, Eve nods, focuses on the feel of their chests and the feel of Villanelle’s thumb on her clit when she pushes two fingers into clenching wet heat.

The sound of their breathing is all that is between them for a while – sharp, shaking breaths that change in pitch, get faster with every roll of their hips against one another – until suddenly Villanelle is kissing her again, murmuring.

“ _More_ ,” she pleads against her mouth.

More of what, Eve doesn’t know, but somewhere buried in her instincts she does, because almost out of reflex she pushes a third finger inside Villanelle. Villanelle sighs in relief, and Eve feels tears behind her eyes again.

“More?” Eve whispers, desperate as her own spine curves, writhing. “What do you want, baby?”

Villanelle whines sharply at that, ruts her hips down over Eve’s hand, her own fingers curling inside Eve at that moment, making her gasp. “ _You,_ ” Villanelle sobs out, and suddenly her movements are harder, and Eve is climbing, scaling the wall of a cliff both familiar and new, entirely reminiscent of the cliff they'd almost driven the car over earlier. “You, I just need _you_ , I– _fuck_ , it’s always been you, Eve–”

A lone tear drips down Eve's cheek as pleasure overwhelms her, and she buries her head in Villanelle’s shoulder, biting down to keep from screaming into the room as she comes, hard and violent, like she was always bound to.

Villanelle is right behind her, pressing her down into the mattress as she shudders, crying out into the pillow by Eve’s head. Their fingers slow, slow, but they make no effort to move; stay sunken within one another, breathing together.

When Villanelle lifts her head, several moments later, Eve is already looking at her, eyes red and weary but sparkling, clinging to the ghost of the orgasm that had just crashed through her.

“Don’t stop,” Eve whispers, pleading, her head pressing back into the pillows as she unconsciously lifts her hips, sighing as her mind empties. “God, don’t ever stop.”

Villanelle gasps against her lips, breathless. “Are you trying to seduce me?”

The laugh Eve lets out then is loud and tumbling, lights up her whole face in a way that has Villanelle positively enraptured. “Is it working?’

She leans down, pressing soft kisses to Eve’s neck. “Maybe.”

Hips lift against her own then, encouraging. “Do I have to beg?”

And really, the idea sends shivers down Villanelle’s spine, makes something coil inside her. But right now, with Eve so beautifully bare beneath her, and so warm and wet around her fingers, Villanelle is helpless to refuse; she curls her fingers inside her once more, revelling in the way Eve’s neck stretches as she moans, and they start again.

Later, Villanelle lies down beside her, their bodies turned to face one another. It is almost reminiscent of Paris, except there is no weapon between them, only ebbing heat and the memory of everything that has happened. Eve’s hand rises between them to splay over Villanelle’s collarbone. Underneath her palm, Villanelle’s heartbeat is a caged bird, fluttering against its imprisonment. She wonders if her own heart races the same.

Villanelle has imagined this moment endlessly. Its softness and smoothness, its fragility and its bittersweet taste. But nothing compares to the reality of Eve, seeing her, feeling her, touching her, tasting her. She watches Eve drift in and out of sleep for hours, clearly settled after a tumultuous week, but even after the ache between her own thighs has subsided, Villanelle finds that she cannot fall asleep herself, unable to stem the thoughts that seek to plague and ruin this perfect moment.

When Eve awakens at 4am, the horizon is gold. The sun is peaking out across the water, orange and bright, but darkness clings to the lake, not quite ready to let go.

Villanelle sits on edge of the bed, her legs dangling over the sides. The sleep-shirt she had been wearing before has been replaced with a simple white tank top that sticks in some places, as though perspired through. Her back is to Eve, and she is focused entirely on a piece of paper that she holds tightly in her hands.

“What’s that?” Eve murmurs sleepily, sitting up and shuffling to sit beside her.

“A letter for me,” Villanelle replies, not looking up from the page. She is studying every word, like it’s a new language for her to learn.

“Oh?” Eve hums, sensing the uneasiness in Villanelle’s voice. She leans close to her, presses a soft kiss to her bare shoulder simply because she wants to. “Who’s it from?”

And Villanelle’s face is impossibly open then, a storming plethora of confusion and fear; her eyes seem caught in a past memory and her voice strains to be strong but misses the mark, comes choked, betrays the nervous fluttering of her stomach. “My father.”

Eve allows herself a brief moment of surprise – little is known about her father on record; she’d assumed he’d died, and she longs to ask questions, to get to know this side of Villanelle too, but she knows the younger woman well enough now to know when not to push. And right now, she looks vulnerable, in a way she seldom ever is or appears to be. Her fingers tremble slightly, makes the paper crunch awkwardly, and her breathing is not the soothing hymn it had been earlier; it is broken now, unsteady, and Eve wonders briefly if she’s trying to preserve all the oxygen inside herself, in case she needs to fight off yet another pair of crushing hands around her neck.

The thought makes Eve’s stomach turn, and she reaches over, takes the letter and sets it aside, takes Villanelle’s hands into her own.They’re cold, but the trembling lessens under Eve’s touch. Eve guides her wordlessly to rest her head in her lap, runs comforting fingers through her honey blonde hair and simply lets her think, lets her hold onto her knees and close her eyes, lets her collect herself enough to catch a complete, untroubled breath.

“He thinks I died,” Villanelle admits, after almost ten minutes of quiet. “Konstantin fed him the cover story, that I’d been killed in prison.”

Eve wants to ask why, but stops herself. The answer is surely obvious – after all, she’s never been under the illusion that Villanelle’s father was a good man, or a good parent.

Instead, she asks: “Did he believe it?”

“Yes,” Villanelle says, nuzzling further into Eve’s lap. “He got a copy of my death certificate and everything.”

“Do you think someone told him you’re still alive?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Twelve, I suppose.”

“Why would they do that?”

Villanelle sighs then, shakily. “To frighten me.”

Eve’s stomach flips a little, and she strokes Villanelle’s hair. “Does he frighten you?”

“There is a reason I never went to find him. A reason I didn’t want him to find me.”

Eve’s mind is racing with questions, hungry for every detail of Villanelle’s past, her family. But stronger than anything she feels is the ache of worry for the woman in her arms, still taut with tremors that she visibly fights to hold control over. Eve manoeuvres Villanelle under the comforter to ensure she’s warm, plumping the pillow around her head and allowing her to close her eyes as she traces absent-minded patterns along her arm.

While Villanelle rests, Eve has a look at the letter that she’d discarded to the foot of the bed. It’s written in Russian, so is instantly inaccessible to Eve – she skims uselessly, knowing she’ll have to rely on Villanelle to learn its contents, when she’s ready to share them. She does, however, notice one or two words that she thinks Konstantin has used in conversations with both Irina and Villanelle. They are, in Russia, terms of endearment, from a father to his daughter.

The idea of such sentiment coming from a man so clearly feared and loathed by Villanelle sits uncomfortably with Eve, and it’s with this sticky thought that she opts to put the letter away and go back to sleep, to look at it with fresh eyes in the morning.

She stops short. Turning the letter over in her hands, she notices then the seal on the back – it’s a red raven seal, one that Eve has seen before.

Heart pounding, Eve gets up, wraps her naked body in the bedsheet and shuffles over to her handbag that lies by the bay window, rummaging around inside it.

Villanelle blinks in the dark, sitting up on the bed. “What are you doing?”

As Eve climbs back onto the bed, Villanelle notices the expression on her face – concern, confusion, worry, like everything she’d ever thought had turned out to be wrong. In Eve’s hands, she holds Villanelle’s father’s letter – and, seemingly, an exact duplicate.

Eve watches as Villanelle takes and reads the poem that she’d first found on the train to Watford Junction back in April; watches as her eyebrows knit in concentration, her fingers clenching tighter around the paper, her face growing harder, until finally she is consumed by an anger that Eve has never seen before.

“When did you get this?” Villanelle demands.

“Months ago,” Eve admits, pulling the sheet tighter around her body as the room goes cold. “I thought…you…”

“No,” Villanelle growls lowly, springing off the bed, clutching the letter in her shaking fist. Her whole body appears to vibrate. The helplessness Eve suddenly feels is swift and painful, and she desperately thinks of the right thing to say, the best sequence of words to diffuse the bomb before it goes off.

It may, however, be too late, Eve thinks, when Villanelle, before she realises, has picked up her wine glass from the night before and crushed it against the bedroom wall, glass shattering to the carpet as the woman growls in angry Russian at no-one in particular.

Eve shoots up from the bed, grabs Villanelle’s arms and squeezes. “Calm down. Hey, _hey_ , look at me. It’s okay.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“We’ll figure it out. We’ll make a plan.” Then, pleadingly: “This doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes _everything_ ,” Villanelle snaps, grabbing Eve by her hips over the bedsheet and gripping her hard. “I will kill him for this. I will _destroy_ him.”

Her hips will ache in the morning with finger-shaped bruises – she ought to retreat. But Eve is unafraid. “Just look at me,” Eve whispers, cupping her cheek and bringing her face down to press their foreheads together, stepping further into her space. “Breathe for me.”

A long beat passes. Villanelle sighs shakily, closes her eyes. After a few long seconds, her grip on Eve’s hips loosen, her fingers sliding around to clench in the sheets at the base of Eve’s back. “He doesn’t get to have you, too,” she promises, her voice trembling. “I won’t let him.”

_Too?_ Eve thinks, but she doesn’t ask – it’s not the time. She just nods against her forehead and lets their lips come brushing. “ _You_ have me,” she whispers, a promise of her own, one that she is – without hesitation – entirely resolute to keep. “Only you.”


	14. Resfeber

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uni deadlines have kicked my ass and will continue to do so until the end of March now, but this little story brings me all the joy

_resfeber: [noun] — when anxiety and anticipation tangle together_

Villanelle is restless for the last hours before morning, squirms in her sleep and murmurs in half-Russian. Much as it pains Eve to admit, it kind of reminds her of Niko – sometimes at night he’d work himself into such a state of stress that he’d grunt in Polish, and his arms would snake all over the bedsheets before finally clamping down around her waist.

Eve hadn’t minded – she’d wanted to help him. But now, she finds she’s more appreciative; Villanelle’s breath is warm against her face, and she smells sweet, like spiced berries. Eve stares and stares and she realises, with the press of Villanelle’s hands endearingly against her chest, that she’d be lying if she said she missed her old life.

Everything she’d ever known, had, loved, all pale in comparison to Villanelle.

She awakes that morning on her back, her legs limp and secured over the slope of Villanelle’s shoulders as a soft tongue works to pleasure her, growing sharper and bolder with every second that Eve regains consciousness. She gasps as she realises what is happening, finds herself lifting her hips on instinct, chasing the pleasure she’s already on her way to.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she gasps, reaching down with both hands to clasp at Villanelle’s soft hair as it moves along her thighs. It’s almost an out-of-body experience — she’s not even sure if she’s really awake, if this is just some beautiful dream. “ _There, yes._ ”

Not that Villanelle needs to be told.

Her orgasm is quick and quiet, stifled by the fist she presses to her mouth, but it transcends her whole body, leaves her keening and quaking into Villanelle’s mouth, clutching at her hair as the roll of her hips slows.

Her legs ache and she’s ridiculously wet — she ought to shower. But open-mouthed kisses across her hips and her stomach keep her in place. Words of ‘ _good morning_ ’ are murmured into her naval, soft and just the tiniest bit smug.

Eve laughs, still dizzied, and leans back into the pillows. “I would say so.”

Villanelle chuckles against her breast then, the sound low and sultry. It shoots through Eve, makes her proffer her chest more, encouraging, and when Villanelle kisses her, lets her taste herself, Eve can’t help but mewl, her hands gliding up Villanelle’s sides to splay against her shoulder blades.

“Beautiful,” Villanelle murmurs between soft kisses, sighing contentedly as fingernails press crescent moons into her flesh. “So beautiful.”

Eve feels heat flare up her neck, her stomach coiling as those words wash over her. Niko had called her beautiful before, countless times, but hearing it come from Villanelle – undoubtedly the most gorgeous woman she’s ever known – is transcendent, makes her feel like it could actually be true. It’s quite possibly the sweetest thing Villanelle has ever done for her.

With this in mind, Eve kisses her harder, invigorated by the soft moan of surprise that she captures for herself. When strong hands still on her shoulders, she moves deliberately and swiftly on top of Villanelle, knees sinking into the bed on either side of her hips. Still she kisses, deeper now with this newfound dominance; she tangles her fingers in Villanelle’s hair and clasps her firmly, just strong enough to remind Villanelle that she’s real, that they both are. Villanelle’s own hands travel up Eve’s back — when one palm slides across a familiar shoulder scar, Eve sighs into her mouth, and kisses her again.

Villanelle smiles as they part for air, leaning up to press soft kisses to Eve’s throat.

Eve exhales, her eyes fluttering closed as her mind refocuses for a moment. “We should really talk.”

And they should – not just about this, but everything that had happened last night, about the letters on the bedside table, what they mean, who they’re from.

“Don’t ruin the moment,” Villanelle suggests, her voice dropping, low and sultry. She takes Eve’s hand and lifts it to her lips, kisses the tips of each of her fingers before guiding them down between her legs, where she’s shockingly ready.

“Make me come,” she whispers, as her hips tilt upwards to drag Eve in. “Just–make me come.”

Above her, Eve’s eyes are shining, hard and glassy but hidden there, just visible, is soft contentment like Villanelle has never known. When Eve dips to meet her in a kiss, Villanelle is waiting with a wanting mouth and a half-moan, as she cants back and forth against Eve’s hand, again and again and again until suddenly stars are exploding behind her eyes and all she can hear is Eve murmuring into her neck, words that might be her birth name.

In those first few days of properly living with Villanelle in Whitehorse, Eve begins to notice little things about her. She observes them carefully, cataloging, for it’s those things she’s always looked for in her, those things she’s always longed to be privy to.

For one, she sings. A lot – and primarily in an English accent. Yelena is a stickler for routine and always has the radio on while she cooks, at any given time of the day, and it becomes apparent that Villanelle knows the lyrics to almost every song that fills the kitchen, no matter how old or new. It’s somewhat endearing, particularly when Irina deigns to sing along with her.

Also, she has a particular skin care routine. It is performed carefully and rigorously every morning - some type of vitamin E blend that brightens the skin around her eyes and leaves her cheeks soft as satin. Eve has to wonder why she needs it – she’s only 26.

Nonetheless, she does so appreciate the softness of those cheeks when they are between her thighs.

It comes as no surprise to Eve that Villanelle is an incredibly sexual being – after all, she is irrevocably beautiful, young and with confidence to boot. As well as being passionate, it’s constant – every night, every morning before Villanelle makes breakfast, sometimes twice during the day. Eve’s missed that feeling, in the beginning where you can’t keep your hands off one another; the thrill and the spontaneity is almost as good as the sex itself. Having been with Niko for more than a decade of her life, Eve had resigned herself long ago to the mundanities of clear-cut, boring sex. Sex with Villanelle is the furthest thing from boring – leaves her delirious and bone-tired in ways she hadn’t ever thought possible. She thinks she must finally understand what it means to be experiencing ‘the best she’s ever had’.

She also finds that fucking Villanelle is by far the most powerful thing she could ever do. To touch her, to taste her, to say exactly the right thing and reduce her to a breathless, desperate mess, is an orgasm in and of itself. It takes practice – something she gets plenty of – but Eve is a fast learner and an eager student, driven to aspiration by the way Villanelle keens, the way her back arches, the way her mouth falls open before her body seizes.

The sight of that is addictive; something Eve can almost taste, in the air between them, and simply knowing that this masterpiece is of her own creation is enough to propel Eve to the edge of her own pleasure, every time.

The sexual element of their relationship had always been there, regardless of Eve’s previous denial of it – it had been an inevitability, and perhaps that’s why it comes easy to Eve. What she hadn’t quite been prepared for – and what she finds most heartwarming of all – is the way Villanelle has opened up to her, and the way she has in return. Villanelle remains vague about her father, diverts the subject enough times for Eve to take the hint, but it’s okay, really, because they do talk, a lot, about everything and nothing; usually after sex but indeed for hours afterwards. It comes naturally, after so many months of games and miscommunication, and it only solidifies in Eve’s mind that she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.

“You taste like raspberries,” Villanelle tells her that evening, breathless as she slumps naked beside her.

Eve breathes hard, turning to face her with flushed cheeks as the world re-knits around her. “Really?”

“Mmm,” Villanelle nods, her tongue darting across her bottom lip. “Raspberries are my favourite.”

“I’ve never liked them.”

“What is your favourite berry?”

“Strawberry.”

Villanelle snorts. “Predictable.”

Eve scoffs, rolling her eyes. “I’m sorry I don’t have pretentious taste in fruit.”

“I’ll take you to Munich,” Villanelle proposes then, with a flash of her eyes. “There is a café there that makes the most amazing raspberry jelly, fresh every day. You will love it.”

Eve smiles. “I’ve never been to Munich. I was supposed to visit years ago for a couples’ weekend, but it fell through last minute.”

Villanelle hums, tilts her head in contemplation. “Is that what normal was for you? Making plans and cancelling them? Couples’ weekends?”

“I guess?”

“It sounds boring.”

“It was my life,” Eve sighs, half-hopeful that Villanelle can try and appreciate that. “For a long time.”

“This will be better,” Villanelle promises quietly, her voice resolute.

Eve says nothing, just smiles again and reaches for her face, touching her fingers to Villanelle’s chin.

Villanelle grins then, triumphantly. “I was very pleased to see that you were not wearing your wedding ring anymore.”

“I bet you were,” Eve murmurs, rolling her eyes.

Villanelle, as an afterthought, schools her face immediately, pulls her mouth into the shape of a concerned frown. “Are you okay?”

“Come on,” Eve sighs. “Ask what you really want to know.”

“Am I the reason?”

Eve is so unsurprised by this question that she laughs. “You’re one of them, yes.”

Villanelle smiles at that, pleased. “That is good to know!” She leans in then, one hand splaying over Eve’s kiss-bruised stomach. “Really though, are you okay?”

Eve smiles softly then, covering Villanelle’s hand with her own. “I am,” she says, and she really means it. 

The next morning, Eve finds her in the kitchen, already dressed for the day. She is humming along to something on the radio as she flips pancakes; behind her, the table is already laid out. Eve slides over to the coffee machine, smiling to find that it’s already on, and mugs have been set out.

“Good morning,” Villanelle murmurs, pressing a soft kiss to Eve’s cheek as she passes her on her way to the table with a stack of pancakes. Eve realises then that she’s wearing Yelena’s apron, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and the domesticity of it settles inside Eve as warmly and welcomely as the coffee does.

“Just us this morning?” Eve asks, half-hopeful.

Villanelle sits, smiling apologetically. “Konstantin, too.” And then, with an eye roll and a huff around a forkful of pancake: “And Carolyn.”

Eve’s head snaps up. “Why? She hates breakfast.”

“Business. We have to get moving at some point,” Villanelle shrugs, her grin returning. “Besides, she has not tried _my_ breakfast. My pancakes are exquisite.”

Eve really can’t argue with that – truly another ‘best she’s ever had’. Still, it’s more than a little disheartening to know that the domestic bubble they’ve been ensconced in is minutes from bursting.

At that, almost as if on cue, Konstantin’s footsteps sound on the stairs. The man strolls into the kitchen, dressed in soft black clothes adorned with a bright orange pattern that elicits a grimace from Villanelle.

“Did you dress in the dark?” she asks him, unimpressed.

He holds up a warning palm to her, staring at his coffee mug as it fills under the machine. “Not before I’ve had my coffee, Villanelle.”

“Ooooh,” she grins, “someone is _grumpy_. Are we not looking forward to seeing our friendly terrorist double agent this morning?”

Eve snorts with laughter around a piece of pancake.

“Knock it off,” he barks, sitting down at the table. “She will be here any moment.”

He is not wrong, for precisely five minutes later, a black Mercedes rental has rolled into the driveway beside Villanelle’s Audi, and Carolyn Martens has joined them at the breakfast table, painstakingly accepting the pancakes that Villanelle piles onto her plate. Eve is almost afraid for Carolyn should she not like them.

Carolyn tries a piece, her eyes fluttering a little. “My God,” she sighs. “These are exceptionally good pancakes.”

Villanelle beams. “Thank you.”

There is no time spared for small talk – Carolyn has never been any good at it, and it seems inappropriate given the matter they must discuss. “Villanelle,” Carolyn begins. “Jerome completed his report.”

“And?”

“Glowing. He’s happy for you to be officially signed off.”

Villanelle smiles around a mouthful of pancake. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Eve’s mouth twitch, her face visibly relieved. It’s nice to see.

“So what now?” Konstantin asks, slurping at his coffee.

“On the plane, you said you wanted a fresh start,” Eve tells Carolyn. “That the Twelve need new leadership.”

Carolyn nods. “Certainly, yes. Everything they’ve done in the last few months is highly reminiscent of what it was like before MI6 stepped in. Unorganised. Messy. Sloppy kills left, right and centre. I can’t abide disorganisation.”

“Is that your decision to make?” Eve is genuinely asking.

“It’s MI6’s,” Carolyn says cooly. “We run the show, have done for a long time now.”

“And how did you come into the fold? Did they, like, hire you?”

“In a way. The Twelve knew that my position within MI6 allows me to select the most trustworthy of people to handle the Twelve’s assassins. People who can direct, and be directed.”

“Was that your plan for me?” Eve asks, half-afraid to know the answer. She feels Villanelle’s eyes flicker over to her.

“Yes,” Carolyn says, as nonchalantly as if she were discussing the weather. “That was the plan, originally. You showed great promise. However, I hadn’t anticipated the events that took place in Rome, even if I had long suspected that you were capable of murder.”

“How could you _possibly_ have known what I was capable of?” Eve asks incredulously. “ _I_ didn’t know I was capable.”

“There’s a certain intuition that comes with the job. But priorities have changed. The Twelve have become too unpredictable. The ultimatum has always been that the Twelve fall in line – conduct their activities quietly, with minimal casualty to life and business – or face dissolution at the hands of our government.”

“Couldn’t you have just – arrested them? Back at the beginning?”

“If only life were so straight-forward, Eve. Unfortunately, with the amount of money and red tape involved, this is the best compromise that could be reached.”

“Yes, all well and good,” Konstantin grumbles, “until they decide to revolt, of course. Which they are doing now.”

“Hence the reason we’re all here. To regain control.”

“And why do you need us for that?” Villanelle shrugs, motioning to Eve. “We are no longer employed by the Twelve _or_ MI6.”

“Well, your personal safety for one. I should like to think you both would like to live your lives without a target on your back. Plus, Villanelle, you really were one of the best. Your skills, combined with Eve’s intelligence and research abilities? I can’t think of any two people better suited.”

Villanelle’s head tilts, interested. “Is there a payday?”

“Of course. And wouldn’t you rather get paid for something you were planning to do for free anyway?”

Villanelle looks to Eve then. Raises an eyebrow. It occurs to Eve, in the silent question in her eyes, that she’s seeking her opinion.

Eve turns her attention to Carolyn, needing more information. She pushes her plate to one side, appetite now whet for different reasons. “What do we actually know about the Twelve? Do we know any names that are connected to them, besides our own? Any possible locations where they may be based?”

“I know of a few locations, yes,” Carolyn says. “Aliases only, however, no real names. Naturally.”

“Who else would know the names?”

“The names are a secret,” Konstantin pipes up. “Only a select few people know. They are called the Keepers.”

“Okay,” Eve says, “what about locations?”

Carolyn shifts then, leans down by her chair to reach inside her handbag. In the centre of the table, with condiments moved aside, she unfolds an A3 monochrome map of the world.

Villanelle blinks. “You just – carry a map in your purse?”

“Of course,” Carolyn says with a frown, dubious. She retrieves a black marker from inside her bag as well, and begins listing countries, circling them with the marker simultaneously: “Switzerland, France, Italy, and, of course, the UK. I’ve heard some chatter about a potential link here in Canada as well, and another” she taps on the map “further offshore in Australia.”

Eve stares hard at the circles on the map, the varying distances, the lack of a visible pattern. The beginnings of a headache twinge behind her eyes.

“Who is the UK’s?” Villanelle asks. “If not you.”

“Dead, unfortunately,” Carolyn frowns at her and Eve. “Thank you, both, again.”

Eve flushes, doesn’t look up from the map as Raymond’s split head plays over her eyes.

Villanelle’s lip quirks up in the corner. “Inconvenient.”

“Somewhat. Still, this is a start.”

“Not much of one,” Konstantin grumbles, gesturing at the map with his hand. “Look at this, there is no sequence or link between them.”

“That we can see, anyway,” Carolyn says.

“They are all very busy,” Villanelle offers.

Konstantin sighs. “Most places are, Villanelle.”

“They are warm?”

“I don’t think the Twelve care much about the weather.”

“They’re rich,” Eve blurts, eyes going wide.

The other three turn to look at her.

Eve is unfazed, excitedly stands up from her chair, her mind racing a mile a minute as the connections begin to form in front of her. “These countries, their central banks are huge, they regulate international finance.”

To illustrate her point, Eve takes the marker from Carolyn, proceeds to circle more countries, darting around Europe before moving east towards Japan, finally ending at the United States.

Her eyes are wide. She counts.

“Twelve countries,” she announces, breathless, like the stars are aligning. “The G12 countries. More commonly referred to as the Twelve.”

Villanelle’s grin in this moment is cheshire. It shoots through Eve, puts her on top of the world.

Carolyn nods, her own smile impressed. “Clever deduction, Eve. That does seem like a logical explanation.”

“Great,” Villanelle says, jumping up from her chair. “I hear Australia is lovely this time of year.”

“Hold on,” Konstantin interrupts, holding his hand up. “We do not know this is right. And besides, where would we even start looking?”

Villanelle huffs.

“Konstantin is right,” Eve says softly, her eyes still fixed on the map, the answers that lie hidden there. “We need proof, hard evidence. Maybe a list of some sort with the names of the Keepers. This,” she points at the map, “only really tells us where to look.”

“How can we be sure a list even exists?” Konstantin argues.

“It will,” Carolyn nods. “There will be an official record, somewhere. Likely in a Keeper’s possession. It’s probably safe to assume that there’s at least one Keeper for every country.”

“So eleven possible people.”

“Ten,” Villanelle corrects Eve. “You are forgetting Giethoorn.”

Eve sighs, dropping the marker on the table. “There’s got to be a way to narrow that number down.”

“I was hoping you could help with the research, Eve,” Carolyn asks. “I have some files on my laptop, confidential information about past Twelve activities. Perhaps you’ll be able to see a pattern that we’ve been missing, so we can decide where to start.”

Eve inhales through her nose, frowning. She glances at the map again, cannot deny that its apparent incompletion sits uncomfortably with her.

“I’ll need time to look everything over,” she says.

Carolyn nods, pleased. “Of course. I can send the files over to you later today.”

By 4pm that evening, Eve is exhausted. After Carolyn had left that morning, she had, as promised, emailed all of the relevant Twelve files over to Villanelle’s laptop, and Eve had been poring over them ever since, making handwritten notes on a pad in the hopes of separating the important information from the supplementary. Villanelle leaves her to it, spends most of the day in the garden with Irina, but after several rounds on the trampoline and countless ball games, she decides to head back upstairs, keen to encourage Eve to take a break from her research, in favour of more fun activities.

Eve is cross-legged on the bed, hair tied up in a bun. The slope of her neck is lovely from this angle. She looks up at Villanelle as she enters the room, immediately beckons her over.

“Come and see this.”

“If it is not porn, I am not interested.”

Eve rolls her eyes, smacks Villanelle’s shoulder softly as the other woman laughs, taking a seat on the bed beside her.

“Look at this,” Eve says, directing Villanelle’s attention to the laptop screen and its many open internet tabs. She clicks onto the first one, bringing up a newspaper article, translated from Hungarian. “János Piroska, head of a small supply company for Budapest, found dead of an apparent overdose in his own home. Nothing remarkable from the outset right?”

“Right?”

“Now look at _these_ ones.”

Villanelle’s eyes widen as Eve brings up another six news articles, all from different European cities, translated into English to detail deaths of company executives who, on the face of it, had all been suicide victims.

“All rich white men,” Villanelle notes distastefully.

“For sure.”

“How did they die?”

“Overdoses, mainly. One of them was found face down in the bath, and another was found with a bullet in his head. Self-inflicted, seemingly.”

At the inflection in her tone, Villanelle turns to her, curious. “What’s making you doubt it?”

Eve clicks onto another tab then. “This man. Diego Alvídrez. He owns Addresort, a huge European company that does everything, from advertising to office supplies. All these other guys, their companies are smaller, more specialist. Potential threats to Diego’s own business.”

“So you are thinking he had them killed.”

“That’s what MI6’s intel points towards, and I’m inclined to agree. He’s certainly rich enough to have put the Twelve onto them, made it look like a string of accidents.”

“What about the other two?” Villanelle asks, nodding her head towards Eve’s last two open tabs.

Eve sighs, scratching at her cheek. “That’s where the pattern seems to break. Likely what’s been throwing MI6.”

“How so?”

Eve clicks onto the tab, bringing up crime scene photos that make Villanelle’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Wow,” she murmurs, fascinated. “That’s a lot of blood for an accident.”

Eve hums. “I can see what Carolyn means when she says the Twelve have become sloppy.”

“Such an incompetent pattern,” Villanelle scoffs. “Diego must have pissed them off.”

Eve frowns, looks at Villanelle. “What makes you say that?”

Villanelle shrugs. “If it were me, I would only leave such a mess if I thought there was any chance that clever people like you would trace it back to Diego.”

Eve blinks. She hadn’t thought of that. It’s brilliant. “That would also reaffirm Carolyn’s claim that the Twelve feel they’ve become untouchable.”

Villanelle sighs, leaning back on the bed. It’s clear she’s growing bored. “Is there anything concrete linking him and the Twelve?”

Eve smiles then, almost wickedly. “You remember all those boxes at the compound in Giethoorn? All those documents, filings, notes?”

“Not really?”

“There was a distinctive logo on most of them, a blue-purple cube with a broken black circle.” She clicks onto another website. “Exactly like this one.”

Villanelle looks. It’s another article, with a picture of a smiling Diego Alvídrez, next to a picture of the very same logo Eve had just described.

“Addresort,” Villanelle reads the headline.

“That’s his company,” Eve grins, breathless. “All over the Twelve’s compound.”

Villanelle’s eyes go wide. “They must have a hand in his pocket.”

“Which puts him as a likely member. Maybe even a Keeper.”

Villanelle is briefly stunned by how bright Eve is shining in this moment. She is in her element when she’s like this, problem-solving, connecting dots – it’s a side of her that Villanelle hasn’t seen much up close, but had always wondered about when they’d been circling eachother for all that time. Had Eve been this excited when she’d been researching her? Had she pored over articles, had she scribbled her thoughts on paper, had she lost sleep?

Watching her like this, Villanelle thinks, may be more enthralling than the chase ever was.

“Where is he now?” she asks.

“He splits his time between the company base in Portugal and his home in Barcelona. I’ll call Carolyn in the morning, see if MI6 can get a fix on him.”

Villanelle sits up then, wrapping both arms tight around Eve’s waist as she slides the laptop away for the moment with a contented sigh. When Eve leans back into her, Villanelle lowers her mouth to her neck.

“I think you are a little pleased,” Villanelle murmurs against her pulse point, “that MI6 did not arrest the Twelve all those years ago.”

Eve’s eyes flutter closed as those lips move across her throat. “Why would that be?”

“Because you and I would never have met.” Villanelle smiles, her breath soft and sweet against her skin. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“I’ll never admit it,” Eve sighs out, smiling. She turns her body then, pressing her forehead to Villanelle’s, and it’s all the confirmation Villanelle needs.

A long moment of quiet passes between them, before Eve speaks again. “We’re going to have to talk about your father at some point, y’know.”

Villanelle twitches, but doesn’t pull back.

Eve cups her arms, reassuringly, but just firmly enough to keep Villanelle’s attention. “How does he fit into all of this?”

“I don’t know.” Her tone is firm; not quite unkind, but nonetheless unwavering.

Eve sighs, knows it’s useless to push her. She dips her head, settles for seeking out her mouth instead. The kiss is soft, but insistent; not a bribe but a reminder of her patience.

Villanelle kisses back, accepting. “I will tell you about him,” she assures Eve when they part. “Just not right now. But I promise his letter has nothing to do with the Twelve. It was mostly that he wants to see me.”

“Okay,” Eve agrees, placated for the time being. She wants to trust that Villanelle wouldn’t lie to her.

Villanelle’s eyes go wide then, a thought occurring to her. “We will need fantastic clothes if we will be travelling to Europe.”

Eve blinks, her stomach roiling as a lick of panic sets in. The thought of jetting straight-first into danger is a thrilling, daunting prospect on its own, but her wardrobe is its own worry.

Villanelle senses Eve’s train of thought in this moment, and grins, delighted at the opportunity presented.

Eve gasps excitedly as she’s tipped onto her back – suddenly the panic is gone, and the knots in her stomach coil tight with anticipation, as Villanelle crawls above her, a predator atop her willing prey.

“I know just the place.”


	15. Nelipot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i like to think of this one as 'the calm before the storm'

_nelipot: [noun] — one who walks barefoot_

“But why!?”

Villanelle exhales loudly, focusing all of her attention on the surface of the lake, concentrating on the ripples to avoid snapping at the sight of Irina’s annoying face.

“ _Because_ ,” she grits out, digging the toe of her sneaker into the grass, splitting the earth, “I have a job to do.”

This answer – for the fifth time – does not satisfy Irina, who makes a point of huffing as she plops down onto the grass. Villanelle stifles a grumble, not sure how much more of this she can endure.

Eve had made the executive decision, on both of their behalfs, to be the one to inform Carolyn and Konstantin of the information they’d uncovered on Iskander Petrov, and subsequently arrange for their departure from Whitehorse. “I’ll handle the details,” she’d said, directing Villanelle to the garden. “You should talk to Irina.”

It had been clever of Eve – clearly, she knows Villanelle well enough now to know that information and planning makes her restless. Action has always been Villanelle’s first instinct, and she’s never had the patience nor the attention span for heavy-duty reconnaissance.

However, Villanelle hadn’t quite been prepared for the level of emotion that Irina is displaying. It’s frightening, and she can’t help but resent Eve a little for throwing her in at the deep end.

Still, this has got to be better than whatever mundane strategies the ‘adults’ are concocting indoors, while Villanelle attempts – again – to deal with Irina’s crabby attitude over her and Eve’s intentions to leave. Even by Villanelle’s standards, the girl is being increasingly stroppy about it.

Villanelle lets out an exasperated sigh, and sits down on the grass beside Irina. She crosses her legs and lays her palms flat on the green in front of her, letting the small soft blades tickle against her palms, cool and dry. She captures tufts between her fingers, and yanks them out of the ground. They float downwind onto the water when she unclenches her fingers.

Irina, next to her, is doing the same. She’s never looked quite this grumpy before.

“Why you?” she mumbles, chin pressed to her chest as she focuses on the grass.

“Why me what?”

“Why do _you_ have to be the one to go?”

Villanelle sighs in resignation, bunching her fists in the earth. “The truth?”

“Yes.”

“Because I want to,” she says, eyes on the water and its gentle stillness. It calls to her. “And sometimes people need to learn when not to push someone. Everyone breaks eventually.”

“Even you?”

“Even me.”

Irina looks at her then. Villanelle thinks she is calming down. “So…you are protecting yourself.”

“Yes.”

“And Eve? And me, and my parents?”

“You – will all be safe, too, yes.”

The girl considers this for a moment, shaking her head disapprovingly. “Máma will be pissed at you.”

Villanelle shrugs. “She’ll understand.”

“What will I do?” Irina asks, voice unusually quiet. “I’ll be alone.”

Villanelle falters, clamped. She feels the weight of Irina’s words deep inside her chest – while she may struggle to empathise with many emotions, loneliness is certainly one she can relate to, and the idea of Irina feeling that way shakes Villanelle to her core.

She finds herself reaching out, wrapping one arm around the girl and bringing her close, leaning her cheek against the top of her curly red head.

“You’re smart,” Villanelle tells her. “You will be fine.”

“But you’re my friend, and friends don’t abandon each other.”

“That is not what I am doing. I will be back soon.”

Irina sniffs back tears, curls her body further into Villanelle. “It’s not fair.”

Villanelle smiles atop her head – ignores the sting behind her own eyes and swallows the lump in her throat. “Nothing is. But these things I have to do will make it more fair.”

“Do you always have to kill people for that?”

“Not always. But this time? Yes.”

She feels Irina nod against her. It fills Villanelle with an odd sense of pride.

“I will send you a gift from my travels, okay?” Villanelle tells her, struck by the urge to offer something incentivising in order to placate her. “Something perfect for you. Something old, and clever, not too shiny or colourful. Something you can learn from and enjoy for a long time.”

At that, Irina finally smiles, approvingly, and Villanelle thinks the stone sinking in her gut is gone now, vanquished by what must be relief.

“I think the Twelve were stupid to make you their enemy,” Irina tells her then, with a warmth in her voice that Villanelle can feel all around her, in the air and in the grass. “You’re smarter than all of them.”

Things move faster than Eve had anticipated.

With a few phone calls from Carolyn, MI6 had been able to verify Diego Alvídrez’s whereabouts – recently returned from a business trip to Germany, he has since been at home at his rather lush estate in Barcelona, overlooking the Pedraforca mountain in the north-east. Local chatter had revealed an upcoming dinner party, set to be hosted by him for a number of business colleagues and other associates; that had been all Carolyn had needed to begin preparations for Eve and Villanelle’s documentation.False passports, driving licences and birth certificates had arrived at the house in a manilla envelope less than eighteen hours after Carolyn had left, along with two plane tickets departing from Erik Neilsen Whitehorse International airport the following morning, connecting through Vancouver International bound for El Prat de Llobregat.

“I’ll contact you when you get there,” Carolyn had told them, as she’d checked the reservation for her own flight back to London. “Just be sure to stay somewhere low-key, will you, Villanelle?”

It is Wednesday morning, a little after 11:30am, and their second plane of the day is minutes from taxiing down the runway and out of Canada – for how long, Eve is unsure. The thought unnerves her – the thrill of their pending mission is undeniable, brings her blood to life in the ways she’d been longing for ever since she first joined MI5, in the ways that only Villanelle is able to coax in her.

But it had been a conversation yesterday, a plan, a research project. Now, sitting in a plane en route into danger with her assassin girlfriend, the reality of her inexperience and inadequacy preys heavily on her mind, swallowing up enough of her brain space that she is quiet for the first hour of their journey.

Villanelle plays games on her phone for that first hour – Eve figures she is either being respectful and letting her process things, or is completely oblivious to her. Either way, Villanelle’s penchant for restlessness rears its head quickly enough; she sighs, blowing out her cheeks, and locks her phone, tapping it thoughtfully against her chin as she turns to look at Eve.

Boredom has never looked more beautiful.

“You are so loud,” Villanelle says, quite unexpectedly.

Eve frowns, confused. “I haven’t said anything. For like, fifty-five minutes.”

“Yes, but your mind is going very fast,” Villanelle explains, touching her index finger to Eve’s glabella. “In here. On and on and on.”

“Sorry?”

“You should say it out loud,” Villanelle suggests. “Tell me what is bothering you.”

Eve considers brushing her off for a moment, changing the subject, but the inclination is fleeting at best. She finds, wondrously, that she has no intention of lying to Villanelle, or taking the easy road. When had anything between them ever been easy, after all? And she knows that if they are to stand any chance of making something work between them, they need to build on the honesty they’ve already established.

Even if Eve’s confession in this moment _is_ a little embarrassing, when talking to one of Europe’s most prolific assassins. “I’m nervous,” she admits, feeling the heat of the colour that rises in her cheeks. “This is – new, for me.”

Villanelle tilts her head to the side – Eve half-expects to see judgement, but there is only curiosity there. “Why?” Villanelle asks. “You have chased people before. And killed people.”

“This is different,” Eve sighs quietly, unsure how to explain it. “I…this is the first time I’ve ever really gone head-first into anything like this. I know that we are probably going to kill people, which is – it’s never been planned, before. It’s always just sort of happened.”

Villanelle blinks, her face softening as she processes what Eve is saying.

“I know I’m probably not making much sense,” Eve grumbles defeatedly. A thought occurs to her. “Do you know what the word ‘nelipot’ means?”

“I have never heard of it.”

“It’s from Ancient Greece, it means when someone walks barefoot. It’s something my Mom used to call me when I was younger. I went through this phase where I wouldn’t wear shoes outside the house, and she said I’d regret it one day.”

“Did you?”

“I stepped on glass in the park. Had to get stitches. I guess my point is, I feel a bit like that now. Like I’m barefoot, about to walk over a shit-ton of broken glass, and the rational part of my mind is telling me that I need to stop, that I need to learn from my mistakes.”

Eve sighs then, aware of the fact that she’s probably confused Villanelle even more with this personal anecdote.

But Villanelle, to her credit, is paying attention, is clearly deep in thought. She is evidently trying to understand what Eve means – it’s oddly endearing.

“Okay,” Villanelle says, nodding once to show they’re on the same page. Then she’s smiling, brighter than the sun visible from the window behind her, and when she reaches for Eve’s hand, Eve swears she feels the rush of a thousand butterflies through her stomach.

“You worry too much,” Villanelle murmurs, entwining their fingers on top of Eve’s jacket, folded neatly in her lap. “You are with me, yes? I’ve done these types of things hundreds of times, so I can help you. The hard part is already over, you have done all the boring stuff!”

“That’s the hard part for _you_ ,” Eve counters. “It’s the easy part for me. What comes next is … that’s the hard part.”

“That’s the _good_ part!” Villanelle exclaims, squeezing her hand assuringly. “You will be fine, I know it. You are a natural.”

Having her murderous capabilities complimented ought to turn Eve’s stomach – as it stands, she finds herself the tiniest bit flattered. It gives her hope that Villanelle might be right.

“You are with me,” Villanelle repeats then, her eyes flashing. “Nothing bad is going to happen. And I will always make sure that you have excellent shoes.”

It’s clear that she’s determined to settle Eve, make her feel better in the assurances that she is going to be safe as long as they’re together. Eve, overcome with a sudden sense of security, squeezes her hand, hoping to convey how appreciative she is of the effort Villanelle is making.

“I can distract you,” Villanelle offers further, smile turning wicked. “If you would like.”

Eve’s stomach dips. She thinks she very much would. “How would you do that?”

Villanelle smirks, then leans back. “We could play I-Spy?”

Eve grumbles, lets go of her hand. “And you say _I’m_ the killjoy.”

“If you guess correctly, I will kiss you.”

“I don’t want to kiss you now.”

“You are a liar. I spy with my little eye, something beginning with … P.”

Eve, in spite of herself, looks around the cabin. “Passenger?”

“Nope.”

“Passport?”

“No. One last try.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Those are the rules of the game!”

Eve sighs, shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t know. Paris?”

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “We are not even _going_ to Paris, Eve.” A grin spreads across her face. “Are you remembering the time you stabbed me?”

“Shut up.”

“Ah, I see, you are being a – what is the English expression? A pained loser?”

“A sore loser. And no I’m not, asshole. Let me guess again.”

“No, you are out of guesses. Shall I tell you what it was?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Pizza,” Villanelle grins, nodding towards the food cart a few rows down. “That lady was just served. I’m going to get _two_ slices.”

Villanelle’s smile is infectious, brings out Eve’s own, and it only grows wider when Villanelle leans in, pressing a firm kiss to her lips.

“But I got the answer wrong,” Eve murmurs, sighing happily against her mouth.

Villanelle hums, kissing her again. “I’ve forgiven you for worse.”

Their arrival in Barcelona is uneventful. Their false passports – fine examples of MI6 string-pulling – pass inspection, and Mae Patel and Adéle Boucher are waved through customs without issue, into the throng of international arrivals making their way between taxi ranks and train stations.

After collecting their luggage, Eve and Villanelle take the Metro to El Born, a bustling neighbourhood of culture and sound. Villanelle leads the way effortlessly, so readily able to navigate the streets of a city she’s loved for years, and brings them to what can only be described as a boutique hotel; it is small, quaint, nothing like the type of place Eve can imagine the younger woman staying in.

Their room, however, is immaculate — complete with a king size bed and soft grey furnishings, and a large bay window offering outstanding city views. It may not appear like Villanelle’s style on the outside, but the place is Oksana, through and through.

“It’s beautiful,” Eve breathes, transfixed by the sight of the city moving outside in the night, vibrant with light and life; in the distance she can see the sparkle of La Sagrada Familia as it begins another light show, can practically hear the buzz of the Las Ramblas strip.

Villanelle chuckles behind her, clearly pleased by Eve’s admiration, the way it mirrors her own. This kind of awe looks truly spectacular on her.

“This is what life with me is like,” she murmurs into Eve’s hair, fingers dancing across her hips. “Only the finest, most beautiful things.”

Eve is struck that she could be included in that. She feels flattery warm its way up her neck as Villanelle’s lips do the same, pressing soft to her pulse point, steadfast.

“When were you last here?” Eve murmurs, eyes fluttering as she leans back into Villanelle’s chest, head tilted to invite her in.

Villanelle hums in the affirmative – it’s a gentle nip against her jawline. “Many months ago. But I love it here. It was my home for a year, before Paris.”

One arm wraps strong around Eve’s waist then, while the other rises, an index finger extended out, guiding Eve’s attention over to the left-most view from the window.

“I had an apartment there, once,” she tells Eve, chin tucked into her shoulder. “In that neighbourhood. And over there,” she points higher, “is where they make the best pizza. It’s right next to a little ice cream parlour – I would get chocolate waffles there.”

“What else?” Eve asks, breathless as images of Villanelle in this life filter through her mind – she pictures her in sundresses, pictures her smiling in the park, can practically hear her speaking Spanish with her neighbours. It’s a lost reality that Eve longs for, another piece of Villanelle she hadn’t even known she’d been searching for.

Villanelle, as ever, indulges her. “I would go for runs when I could, around there,” she tells Eve, outlining a route for her in the twinkly dark. A smile creeps into her voice as her finger moves further right. “And on weekends I would go shopping there, at Las Ramblas. All the most exquisite pieces.”

“I can imagine.”

Eve gasps then as both hands settle firmly over her waist, and a wandering mouth slides back onto her neck, re-focused.

“You won’t have to imagine anymore,” Villanelle murmurs against her skin. “Tomorrow, I am taking you there. We will spend a fortune together.”

A moan crawls up Eve’s throat at the thought – she remembers her suitcase in Berlin, filled with expensive things; she remembers how the dress had made her feel, how the shoes had been her size, how she’d looked into the mirror and taken her hair down and seen herself exactly how Villanelle must have been seeing her, even though they’d only met once.

It had jarred her then. Being seen in that light, all fine lines and perfect fits, had been just as erotic as it had been terrifying. Eve’s own taste in clothes has never been of much importance to her, but she’s certain, with Villanelle’s clear vision for her, that she could achieve that level of sexy, unadulterated power that comes with the perfect outfit.

“You’re beautiful, Eve,” Villanelle tells her, her mouth’s intent growing stronger. “And I’m going to make you feel it.”

 _You already do,_ Eve longs to tell her, but her mind is growing muddled, occupied by other things. She watches outside as hands creep under her shirt, teasing and deliberate, and when fingers disappear under the hem of her jeans, she gasps, leans back further and lets the pleasure roll over her, for all of Barcelona to see.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: @a_stankova  
> comments are appreciated!


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